Pixels !!! All of us have been using this term for quite a long time now and i bet no matter how awesome you think you are in terms of working with pixels, this post will leave you enriched .(Okay went a little overboard there, but you get the gist). To begin our journey, like any other lecture, lets first define a pixel. The reference pixel is the visual angle of one pixel on a device with a pixel density of 96dpi and a distance from the reader of an arm’s length. For a nominal arm’s length of 28 inches, the visual angle is therefore about 0.0213 degrees. For reading at arm’s length, 1px thus corresponds to about 0.26 mm (1/96 inch). Okay, so you were saying you are an expert :D A simpler definition would be the smallest unit of any display that can be individually processed. Well that makes sense. So pixel is the smallest unit of an image, so that means it can’t be further magnified right ? but this doesn’t seem to be correct, we surely can magnify any screen, so what is it that we are seeing there? a magnified pixel ? okay too many questions !!! Seriously Stop !!! Now that i have got your curiosity, let me tell you this article will not be dealing with images but with web development and pixel related issues. Image related issues are for another article maybe in the future!! MAYBE. There are 3 types of pixels (There always are, aren’t there ?) : 1. CSS Pixels. Cascading Style Sheet(CSS) Pixels.Device Pixels.(DPI orPPI)Device Independent Pixels(DIP). As a mentions — popular post The CSS pixel is a ‘reference’ pixel. It is an abstract concept, designed for the use of web developers. This is the same pixel value used in declaration of CSS properties. .SAMPLE_DIV{ width : 500px;} It is generally said that CSS pixels if mentioned as a property can never be changed, Suppose you set an element padding as 25%. When you zoom in, the pixels grow in size( Obviously, that’s why the image appears pixelated). Due to this, the number of pixels in a unit area decreases, i.e now the 25% of the screen would contain lesser number of pixels hence the padding of the element would decrease (WHATTTT !!). 2. Device Pixels (DPI or PPI). Device pixels are also termed as number of Dots Per Inch (DPI) or Pixels Per Inch(PPI). DPI is more common place though and is a fairly popular term in gaming community (All Gamers ❤ from this side of the world). The higher the number, the smaller the size of the pixels, so graphics are perceived as more crisp and less pixelated. The concept of DPI is also used in printing( although the dots and their formation is there). different The Specs you hear while purchasing your electronic device — 1366 x 768 px, these are the device pixels, the ones that are fixed for your device and can not be changed. 3. Density Independent Pixels (DIP). Also an abstract concept. Formally DIP are number of CSS pixels that are optimal for viewing a website on the device. The relationship between DIP and DPI is : Device Pixel Ratio (DPR) = DPI/DIP DIP forms the logical portion of the pixels, one that you see, one that is actually being used to display the content onto your device’s screen. For example consider a device with DPI 2560 px and DIP 1280 px, that means your device can support 2560 px worth of content but your browser is only showing 1280 px content, so for every 2 hardware pixel we are having a single pixel on the screen, which is displaying the content.Another example, suppose you have a device of DPR 2 and DPI 640 px (Seriously these short forms are giving me headaches now !!), so how much viewport width(Another fancy name for DIP ) would be required to display the content.According to DPR we can conclude for every 2 device pixel we have a single logical pixel, i.e 640/2 = 320 px would be the required viewport width.Conclusion. I believe it wont be too erroneous to say that- pixels is actually not a pixel. So next time anyone tell you something is x pixel, you know what to ask What kind of pixel ?

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Hello Everyone. This will be the first part of my multi-part series which will explain the concept of microservices and how to orchestrate calls between them keeping in mind things like performance, latency and scalability. At the end of this series I intend to have a fully functional multi-tiered application which follows best practices for design and implementation. I will concentrate on one component per post and also share the source code on Git for your learning purpose and reference. CONCEPTS:  WHAT IS A MICROSERVICE ? The traditional way of building web applications was to build one single artifact (say WAR file) which will have all your functionality wrapped inside of it. This single application will do everything from serving user requests, running reports, CRON job, interfacing with databases and other external third part services. This kind of application is said to be Monolithic in nature. Microservice based architecture emphasizes on not having a single deployable artifact but to have multiple smaller independently deployable artifacts.  Each smaller artifact deals with only part of the applications functionality. All modules work together to provide the functionality required of the application. Advantages of Microservices over Monolithic 1. FASTER DEVELOPMENT Faster releases and changes out the door !!! Microservices consists of smaller independently deployable modules in comparison to a single deployable artifact in Monolithic architecture. This means that each application has its own code based. So, you can easily split your team into smaller functional teams and have them work independently on different modules without having each other step over one another or be blocked on some dependencies. If at all there are any dependencies, those can be easily mocked and the work can be carried out without any interruption. 2. BETTER UNIT TESTING More confidence with well tested code !!!! Since each module is just dealing with a subset of functionality provided by the application as a whole, it much easier to test manually or using automated tool. Its also easy for developers to write unit tests 3. CHOICE OF TECHNOLOGY Keep your tech stack up to date !!! The main goal is for all modules to work well together. It is not necessary for all of the modules to leverage the same technology or frameworks/libraries. Each team can choose to implement the module they own in whatever technology they have expertise in. This also means that it’s easier to keep the applications tech stack up to date with contemporary library versions and dependencies while giving each team the independence to do what they want. 4. SCALABILITY Scale independently, when and how you want !!!! Each module can be independently scaled up (vertical) or sideways (horizontal) to handle any spike in incoming requests. Modules performing any heavy lifting can scale vertically while those handing light weight stateless requests can scale horizontally. Microservices help you scale out and back again once the traffic spike is gone. 5. VIRTUAL MACHINE OR INSTANCE CONFIGURATION Save $$$ with infrastructure !!! With microservices you no longer need to have all your VM's or nodes have the same amount of resource. You are free to allocate more resource to more demanding modules and keep light weight modules on lean hardware. This will eventually help bring down the computing/infrastructure cost. 6. DOWNTIMES Less downtime impact !!!! Each module can be deployed independently without affecting the others. Also, if system is architectured well, the application can still be functional when one or more less important modules are brought down for maintenance or due to some issue. 7. MONITORING More granular monitoring More precise monitoring of the applications. Depending on what tools you are using one can easily find out how each module is performing and how its contributing towards any request latency. 8. EASIER PROBLEM ISOLATION Save time !!! Its much easier to isolate a problem to a particular module. This saves time and energy and avoids you having to debug the entire application as a whole. SOME DRAWBACK OF MICROSERVICES 1. PROBLEM ISOLATION AND TROUBLESHOOTING Since now you are dealing with a distributed system, it becomes difficult to isolate where something is breaking. It is easier to isolate the module but sometimes or most of the times the breaking module might have dependency on other modules for data. The incoming data might be the problem which could be due to an issue in the other module. Each developer would have a higher responsibility to understand the overall system and how different modules interact with each other. 2. OPERATIONAL OVERHEAD Many modules and different teams means that there is always some deployment happening somewhere. There is an operational overhead to take care of the deployments and ensuring that the updated components play well with the other existing components. 3. SPEED OVER DUPLICATION If the application is large there is a very possibility of having duplication of code/functionality in different modules. But this is a compromise that one has to make when demanding faster development and shorter release cycles for an application.

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MICROSERVICES - PART 1

AWS Elastic Container Service(ECS) makes it very easy for anyone to run and manage their docker container applications on cloud. All one has to do is create a cluster and provide the name of the docker image to pull and run as a service in the cluster. There's a lot of magic happening behind the scene and its not necessary for everyone to know. But if you are curious, this article is for you. Here we take a deep dive into how AWS ECS works and all the internal workings of ECS. This will definitely help one understand ECS better and also take a sneak peek at the secret sauce behind AWS ECS. ECS: 10,000 FOOT OVERVIEW 1. All docker container images are tagged and stored in AWS ECR (Elastic Container Repository). 2. ECS Task Definition contains details about the docker image location and the tag that needs to be run on the ECS as a container. 3. ECS reads the task definition and schedules the tasks on the EC2 instances registered with it. 4. Each EC2 instance(usually running Amazon Linux or Amazon Linux 2 ECS Optimized AMI) has a ECS-AGENT which pulls the docker image from ECR and runs it on the EC2 instance. This looks dead simple. The EC2 instances are usually managed through auto-scaling group, allowing the number of tasks/containers running in the ECS cluster to group or shrink based on different cloudwatch metrics associated with the application. Fig 1: AWS ECS ECS: DEEP DIVE Running containers in ECS can be broken down into two parts: ECS takes care of scheduling container(knows as tasks in ECS) on different EC2 instances. Once the task is scheduled on EC2, the ECS-AGENT takes care of the running the image as a container. The bulk of the magic happens within the "ECS Optimized Machine Image" that is running on the EC2 instances !!!> 1. Scheduling: 2. Orchestration: AWS ECS OPTIMIZED AMI Fig 2: Internals of ECS Optimized AMI (Amazon Linux 2) The ECS Optimized AMI is: 1. Amazon Linux or Amazon Linux 2 (based on CentOS Kernel) 2. Docker 3. Comes pre-loaded with the following core packages: ECS-Agent Cloud-Init Container Storage Setup The machine has Docker running as daemon. There is also a start up script which pulls and runs the ECS-Agent as a daemon. ECS-Agent is the core of the Elastic Container Service and its necessary for it to keep it running. 1. Parse the ECS Task Definition details, pull the docker image from ECR and run the image on the EC2 instance based on the run config provided in the ECS Task Definition. 2. Clean up old, unused images of applications that were run on the EC2 instance. 3. Rotate logs files generated by ECS-Agent. 4. Integrate with AWS IAM to generate temporary credentials based on the IAM Role associated with the ECS TASK (configured in task definition) and make it available to the running ECS Task. The following are the tasks that the ECS-Agent does: Fig 3: ECS Agent Service [/etc/systemd/system/ecs-agent.service] CLOUD-INIT The cloud-init package is which is now a defacto on most of the linux distributions. This package performs early initialization of cloud instances. This package is also responsible for running the "user-data" scripts that are provided during the EC2 instance start up. Without the cloud-init package the user-data script won't run. The user data provided to the EC2 instance is stored under "/var/lib/cloud/instance/user-data.txt" . Cloud-init also enabled one to configure scripts that can be run every time the OS boots on the EC2 instance or per start of the instance or once. Scripts can be placed in the appropriate directory under "/var/lib/cloud/scripts" Instance information is fetched from AWS EC2 metadata endpoint and stored in /run/cloud-init/instance-data.json Fig 4: Cloud-Init Directories CONTAINER STORAGE SETUP ECS optimized AMI has in-built scripts to spin up a 22GB EBS volume and attach it to the EC2 instance as part of the boot up process. This additional volume is used as a scratch space docker, the ECS-AGENT container and other containers that would run on the EC2 instances. The additional volume is not used for storing anything related to the operating system running on EC2. utility is used to prepare and setup the volume for use with docker storage driver. Docker versions >= 1.8 Container Storage Setup Fig 5: Volumes on ECS Optimized AMI based EC2 instances 1. ECS-Agent container and any other containers on the EC2 should be run with HOST networking mode otherwise the container will not be able to reach the AWS container meta-data endpoint to retrieve the ECS Task IAM roles or other metadata related to the container. OTHER OBSERVATIONS

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A DEEP DIVE into AWS ECS Optimized AMI

Photo by Thomas Jensen on h Unsplas Most of the business applications which are used today communicate with each other using HTTP 1.1 using REST. This has become a standard in the industry due to its sheer simplicity and almost no effort required to integrate the applications. However, once your application goes to the scale of handling a million requests per second and more, the shortcomings of the above mechanism become apparent. Let’s address those first — No Multiplexing A single HTTP 1.1 connection can only be used to send one request and response at a time. This connection is blocked until the response is received which is highly inefficient. Limited compression HTTP 1.1 headers are not compressed which leads to an unnecessary increase in request data size. In HTTP/2, they are compressed using HPACK algorithm which has 99% compression ratio. Text-based transmission HTTP 1.1 is text-based which is highly inefficient for transmission of data. They require complex parsers and also don’t support high levels of compression. HTTP 2 was made to get rid of all these limitations. It supports multiplexing which allows a client to send multiple parallel requests over a single connection. The headers are compressed using HPACK compression algorithm and transmit binary data. provides a detailed comparison along with performance metrics for both protocols. This article In this article, we’ll be exploring how you can use HTTP/2 in your service. Currently, the most popular way to do this is to use . gRPC by Google gRPC In simple words, it is a web framework used to connect multiple services using HTTP/2. It is currently used by hundreds of companies to efficiently connect microservices. gRPC services differ from REST in the way that they don’t expose endpoints but methods/procedures. The client simply calls a method as if it is locally implemented and in the background, an RPC call is sent to the server which contains the actual implementation of the method. The interface of the service and its methods is defined in a .proto file. This is because gRPC uses Protocol buffers to transfer the data between various services as well as to generate client and server stubs. This results in an order of magnitude faster serialization and deserialization speeds. The detailed comparison between Protocol Buffers, JSON and Flatbuffers can be found in by me. this article The RPC call is done over HTTP/2. This allows gRPC users to automatically leverage all the features of the above protocol. Let’s create a simple Hello World service in gRPC using Java. The example provided here can be found on https://grpc.io/docs/quickstart/java/ Define the service First, we define the interface of the service in a .proto file. Let’s name this file greeter.proto We name the service Greeter. This service contains a method SayHello. The method accepts a HelloRequest object and returns a HelloReply object. Next, we define the format of HelloRequest and HelloReply ProtocolBuffers. syntax = ; { rpc SayHello (HelloRequest) returns (HelloReply) {}
} message HelloRequest { name = ;
} message HelloReply { message = ;
} "proto3" // The greeting service definition. service Greeter // Sends a greeting // The request message containing the user's name. string 1 // The response message containing the greetings string 1 Generate the interfaces Next, we’ll generate the service interface and client stub using protobuf compiler. Create your usual maven java project. Next copy the greeter.proto file in src/main/proto folder. Once it is there, we can use maven proto compiler to generate Java classes from this file. UTF-8 1.19.0 3.6.1 3.6.1 1.7 1.7 ${basedir}/target/generated-sources/ kr.motd.maven os-maven-plugin 1.6.2 org.xolstice.maven.plugins protobuf-maven-plugin 0.5.1 com.google.protobuf:protoc:${protoc.version}:exe:${os.detected.classifier} grpc-java io.grpc:protoc-gen-grpc-java:${grpc.version}:exe:${os.detected.classifier} compile compile-custom test-compile test-compile-custom sasas < > properties < > project.build.sourceEncoding </ > project.build.sourceEncoding < > grpc.version </ > grpc.version  < > protobuf.version </ > protobuf.version < > protoc.version </ > protoc.version  < > maven.compiler.source </ > maven.compiler.source < > maven.compiler.target </ > maven.compiler.target </ > properties < > build < > sourceDirectory </ > sourceDirectory < > extensions < > extension < > groupId </ > groupId < > artifactId </ > artifactId < > version </ > version </ > extension </ > extensions < > plugins < > plugin < > groupId </ > groupId < > artifactId </ > artifactId < > version </ > version < > configuration < > protocArtifact </ > protocArtifact < > pluginId </ > pluginId < > pluginArtifact </ > pluginArtifact </ > configuration < > executions < > execution < > goals < > goal </ > goal < > goal </ > goal < > goal </ > goal < > goal </ > goal </ > goals </ > execution </ > executions </ > plugin </ > plugins </ > build The classes will be generated in target/generated-sources/protobuf directory. Implement the service We can now extend the service interface generated to implement the methods. { { HelloReply reply = HelloReply.newBuilder().setMessage( + req.getName()).build(); responseObserver.onNext(reply); responseObserver.onCompleted();
  }
} private . class GreeterImpl extends GreeterGrpc GreeterImplBase @Override public void sayHello (HelloRequest req, StreamObserver<HelloReply> responseObserver) //Build Proto Messages Object "Hello " //Send the response, you can send multiple objects which will be trasmitted in streaming fashion //Indicate client that response has finished Implement the client Clients can now simply call this sayHello method and the service will return the response via HTTP/2 { ManagedChannel channel; GreeterBlockingStub blockingStub; GreeterStub asyncStub; {
     channel = ManagedChannelBuilder.forAddress(host, port).usePlaintext().build(); blockingStub = GreeterGrpc.newBlockingStub(channel); asyncStub = GreeterGrpc.newStub(channel); } {
      logger.info( + name + );
      HelloRequest request = HelloRequest.newBuilder().setName(name).build();
      HelloReply response; {
        response = blockingStub.sayHello(request);
      } (StatusRuntimeException e) {
        logger.log(Level.WARNING, , e.getStatus()); ;
      }
      logger.info( + response.getMessage());
  } {
    
      StreamObserver<HelloReply> responseObserver = StreamObserver<HelloReply>() { {
            logger.info( + response.getMessage());
          } {
            Status status = Status.fromThrowable(t);
            logger.log(Level.WARNING, , status);
          } {
            info( );
          }
      };
      
      logger.info( + name + );
      HelloRequest request = HelloRequest.newBuilder().setName(name).build();
      asyncStub.sayHello(request, responseObserver);
        
  }
  
} public class Client private final private final private final public Client (String host, String port) //remove .usePlainText for secure connections // use it to make blocking calls // or use this to make async calls public void blockingGreet (String name) "Will try to greet " " ..." try catch "RPC failed: {0}" return "Greeting: " public void asyncGreet (String name) new @Override public void onNext (HelloReply response) "Greeting: " @Override public void onError (Throwable t) "RPC Failed: {0}" @Override public void onCompleted () "Finished Greeting" "Will try to greet " " ..." Run the server You can either use the server bundled with grpc or you can use external frameworks which already provide grpc bindings such as Vert.x Java { (ServerBuilder.forPort(port), port);
} { .port = port;
  server = serverBuilder.addService( GreeterImpl()).build();
} {
  server.start();
  logger.info( + port);
} IOException public GreeterServer ( port) int throws this public GreeterServer (ServerBuilder<?> serverBuilder, port) int this new IOException public void start () throws "Server started, listening on " Now, you have successfully implemented a basic gRPC service. Load balancing The non-trivial part of running a http/2 service in production is load balancing. gRPC breaks the standard connection-level load balancing i.e. to create a new connection to another instance for a request which is provided by default in Kubernetes or HAProxy. This is because gRPC is built on HTTP/2, and HTTP/2 is designed to have a single long-lived TCP connection. The solution is to do request level load balancing. This means to create long-lived connections and then distribute requests across those connections. The easiest and most effective way to do this is to use . It is a service-mesh which can run beside your Kubernetes/Mesos or any other cluster. Linkerd2 serves as a proxy for the incoming request. Since it is written in rust it adds a very minimal delay (<1ms) and load balance requests across host machines which it can detect through k8s API or DNS. linkerd2 You don’t need to configure anything extra in Linkerd2, it handles HTTP 1 and 2 traffic by default. If you want to learn more about gRPC, linkerD or http/2 you can refer the links below: gRPC Load Balancing on Kubernetes without Tears HTTP/2: the difference between HTTP/1.1, benefits and how to use it gRPC Java — Basics Connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter or drop a mail to kharekartik@gmail.com

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Here’s How You Can  and Why You Should Go Beyond HTTP 1.1

Leading researchers like Karl Friston —creating computational statistical models that minimize prediction-error. The human brain operates much the same way, also learning from data. A common argument goes: describe AI as "active inference" "AI will never be intelligent because it needs to see something thousands of times to learn it, while a human only needs to see something once." simply: " " As describes, "anyone on a mission to create a first-class AI-powered product needs vast amounts of data to feed to the machines," because multiple parameters and classes need to be learned. Others put it the more, the better. this Medium article However, we can outline a few ways to circumvent the need for big data in your AI journey: Transfer learning (including one-shot and zero-shot learning) Turn-key solutions (High quality) little data 1. Transfer Learning “Transfer learning is an up-and-coming technique that allows us to transfer the knowledge learned in one dataset and apply it to another dataset.” - Bradley Arsenault Transfer learning essentially takes learning from one domain and brings it to another, so you don't have to start from 0. This is especially useful in highly-specific domains with not much data available. To visualize it: This goes into the nuances of transfer learning. Besides not having to start from 0 with transfer learning, there are methods such as one-shot or even zero-shot learning that enable training models with minimal data. super in-depth guide One-shot learning is to infer required output based on just one or few training examples, as discussed in this paper: . ‘One Shot Learning of Object Categories’ Zero-shot learning is a more extreme version of the above, where no labelled examples are used to learn a task. 2. Turn-key solutions The second method of deploying AI with less data is by using turn-key solutions, that are already pre-trained on massive quantities of data. Here are just a few examples: Google Cloud AI "Google Cloud’s AI Hub provides enterprise-grade sharing capabilities, including end-to-end AI pipelines and out-of-the-box algorithms, that let your organization privately host AI content to foster reuse and collaboration among internal developers and users..." Microsoft Azure AI Platform "Only Azure empowers you with the most advanced machine learning capabilities. Quickly and easily build, train, and deploy your machine learning models using Azure Machine Learning, Azure Databricks and ONNX..." Amazon Machine Learning "AWS pre-trained AI Services provide ready-made intelligence for your applications and workflows. AI Services easily integrate with your applications to address common use cases such as personalized recommendations, modernizing your contact center, improving safety and security, and increasing customer engagement..." 3. Little data More data is not always , especially if that data is not labelled, not indicative of the problem at hand, or dirty. You might have millions of rows, but if it's messy data that's hardly relevant to the problem and only usable with unsupervised learning, then a smaller, highly-targeted, and clean data-set would be much better to have. better lists a few questions to decide between using little data and big data: This article Do you already have the data you need, and is it labeled? What’s your use case and what is the minimum data needed to address it? How advanced is your organization (really) when it comes to AI/ML? While big data is all the rage, it's not the only way to fuel ML models. would go even so far as to say that small data is the future of AI. Some A great discusses a few specific cases of using little data in the real-world. Harvard Business Review article For example, "researchers at Vicarious have developed a model that can at a far higher rate than deep neural networks and with 300-fold more data efficiency." Their model needed only training examples per character. break through CAPTCHAs five In conclusion, more data be better, and if you have it available, then great! However, if you don't, there are still ways to deploy AI in your organization. can

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Busting AI Myths: "You Need Tons of Data for Machine Learning"

Software developers are mostly happy to work by themselves at night in dark rooms. And they turn coffee, cola and pizza into code. Right? My experience so far To be honest, the longer I have worked in software development the more wrong this stereotype feels to me. True, when I learned to code I enjoyed those solitary moments of puzzling out a solution to a tricky problem. I didn't count the hours and proudly told my colleagues and friends about the nights I worked away. The first years of my career as a software developer I worked in a small team of three people where everyone had their specific expertise. I was responsible for the client application we developed for an in-house application. I was the only one working with the specific technologies and libraries I used to create the UIs and so it was basically me and a mixture of Google and API documentations of sorts (it was way before stackoverflow.com was born). I sometimes asked my colleagues for help, but most of the time they were trying to solve their own problems and weren't of much help to me. After five years I left this company to start a job as an IT consultant. Over the next six years I worked in many different teams - together with my colleagues in our own office, as a small team at our customer's office or alone inside a customer's team. Some of those teams were people happening to work on the same problem, some were 'real' teams. So, when is a group actually a team? To me, a real team is not just people working on the same problem, but people having a common goal and collaborating closely. The common goal is the overall problem we are trying to solve. We don't develop software to satisfy our desire for shiny tech stuff - well, not only, at least. We try to make life easier for our customers and users. Collaborating closely means working others, not only others. Over time I have identified several characteristics I deem necessary for great teams. with near Autonomous The best teams I have worked in were autonomous to a certain degree. Sure, some teams have very wide boundaries and can choose many things from the languages, libraries and tools they use to what problems they want to work on. Others have more restrictions. While working as part of a team, one important thing to me was always to have clear boundaries that I know of and understand. Then I wanted to be free to decide inside those boundaries. This way I was able to feel lots of autonomy even in environments that were very regulated. I think software developers need autonomy as a pre-condition to be creative in their finding of solutions, which brings us to... Creative "We have always done it like that." This is one of the sentences I dread most. It strips me of all the creativity I have. Although we may always done things like that - this doesn't mean we can't improve by trying something different. have Therefore I think that creativity - the intrinsic drive to find new (and better) solutions to existing problems - is key for software development. Technology and user needs change so quickly that yesterday's solutions often aren't fit for today's challenges. Creativity is an individual trait that can radiate into and stimulate a team. In my experience, creative teams are also... Curious I am a very curious person. I can't count the side projects I have started because I was interested in learning something new - a new technology, a new problem domain, a new way of thinking. Like creativity, curiosity is an individual trait. Curious people ask lots of questions. Those questions help finding out about the root cause of a problem. They also enable us to create more information about a specific context in which our solution might be applied. This helps prevent solutions that are clunky at best, and unfit for the problem at worst. Now that we have talked about individual traits that help a Development Team become the best it can, there are a few team characteristics. Great teams are... Diverse Let's look back at the stereotype that I started this post with. First of all, I think (hope) it is hard to find a team of people embodying this cliché. At least those teams that I like to remember for the fun and effectiveness we were able to have, were different. They consisted of very different people. People of different gender, race, beliefs, age, etc. This diversity made it possible to create a bigger context of experiences and knowledge. We have been brought up differently, lived differently and were able to work as a team nonetheless. Diversity induces tolerance. Diversity as described here is one side of the coin. Great teams I have worked in were also... Cross-functional Diversity for me describes who someone is. When I talk about cross-functionality, I talk about what someone knows and is able to do - the type of expertise someone has. In the complex environment of software development there are many different special types of knowledge that we need in order to solve a problem. From the business or problem domain via different parts of technology, systems and their dependencies to running, monitoring and maintaining the solution. One person can't have all this knowledge in the depth needed. Therefore we need individuals who are experts in one or more of those domains and who are... Generous Sharing knowledge and experience is key for a cross-functional team. It helps individuals to grow and the whole team to improve. Software development is not a zero-sum game. This means that the benefit of one part of the system has to come with a loss for another part. The more individuals share, the more the team members and the overall team improves. A colleague who benefits from my knowledge and experience doesn't take anything away from me, on the contrary: by sharing with and learning from each other we all benefit. How to get there? While those traits are beneficial for the individual team member, they are also very much improving the overall team and its performance. In my experience the cost of trying to continuously improve a team in those and other aspects is more than outweighed by the long-time benefits the team and the company gain. The question now is how can you create and grow a team with those characteristics? To be honest, I don't know. I don't even think there is a single recipe for creating great teams. What I have experienced in the past is that I can work with my teammates and colleagues, discuss where we are at the moment (and celebrate our successes so far) and what we can do to further improve. Some concrete things that I have seen work in the teams I worked with were: * Sharing knowledge within teams: brown bag lunches, tech talks, pair / mob programming * Invite management to explicitly define the boundaries the team has to respect in their self-organisation and periodically review them, e.g. as part of a Retrospective * When stuck with a problem, doing something completely different in order to get new insights and fresh ideas * Trying to learn more about the business domains - maybe collaborating with a business user of your system for a few hours or days will help you understand what they are really struggling with * Inviting other teams or colleagues not directly working with the system we create to reviews and ask for their feedback; sometimes just explaining what we have tried to do to someone unrelated helps create a better picture This list is by far not complete. These are just some very few examples of things I did in the past. I always enjoy meeting other software developers, discuss teamwork and exchange experiences. I think peer consulting is a great way to improve. It is not about finding the best way of working as a team. To me it is more about finding out what others do and how this might be applicable to my own situation. What is your experience? Which characteristics do you see that make up great teams? How to you (self-)improve in your teams? Do you disagree? I am curious about your comments. If you are a Scrum Master, how do you (or could you) help your team improve in those aspects? By Professional Scrum Trainer Peter Goetz , Scrum.org

On Creating Team Culture Amongst Developers

Managing engineers is surprisingly not dissimilar to managing people in other workforces, but there still are some nuances every manager should know. Whether you’ve been struggling to keep your engineers productive or you just want to avoid any problems in the future, these are the things you should know. Follow Proper Metrics Every team should have a dedicated set of KPIs specific to their goals to track. Following these metrics can help you better understand where your software engineering team is and can help you identify areas that need improvement. If you follow the wrong metrics, however, you can waste precious time analysing data that is unimportant to your project. Encourage Improvement Software engineers are constantly improving their skills so they can create new bigger and better things. Encourage that! Don’t force them into a box doing the same tasks day-in and day-out. Instead, recognise that desire for growth, and you’ll see it in the results. Foster Communication You can never know if there’s a problem if your engineers aren’t willing or ready to tell you. You should foster a culture of communication where nobody is too nervous to give their opinion or tell the truth. With everyone in the loop, communicating problems and needs, you can get them what they need to be more efficient and happier with their work. Trust Them Every worker wants to know that their manager trusts and has faith in them. If you feel like your manager is doubting your skills at every turn, would that incentives you to do more and better work? No! Encourage your engineers and help them overcome obstacles. Create a culture of inspiration and they’ll be more comfortable trying new things. Quality Over Quantity You might think that it’s better to finish multiple projects sooner rather than one later, but this can put undue pressure on the engineering team and poor results. You might think that the answer is to throw more people onto a project, but this can lead to confusion. Instead, assign tasks to individual members and focus on the quality of the work first and foremost. Use the Latest and Greatest Working with old or broken code and/or software is an annoyance and can hinder an engineer’s job. They need the right tools for the job and with the latest and greatest, they’ll feel inspired in their role and it shows that you are willing to go above and beyond to make them happy. Focus on Training Following the previous point, you need to ensure that you aren’t adding unnecessary complexity to your engineer’s role with the new technology you’re supplying them with. Make sure to keep them up to speed and train them on the technology so they can jump in as soon as possible. Do the Small Work Engineers are there because they love to code and create new, innovative ideas. Why bog them down with endless paperwork and non-technical meetings? If you want a happier, more productive, and more efficient team of engineers, do the small, unimportant tasks for them so they can focus on their dedicated role on the team. If you can keep the engineering team happy, you can keep your stakeholders and superiors happy as well. There really isn’t one magic way to improve the production of your team, but when you start with making them happy, others will follow. First time published on blog: Waydev https://waydev.co/blog

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this is derived from a hackernoon community thread . these answers are by @BeastlyBeast . How do you think the bank could work differently for the next couple generations? In the US, I’d like to see a lot more regulation to protect the average person from financial sharks or from bad actors causing systemic risk. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect Bitcoin to replace the USD. It will never happen. But over time, perhaps governments will stabilize the value of their currency some using Bitcoin as a reserve. And people with the worst of the worst governments can switch to Bitcoin to opt-out. Having that option of a self-sovereign & secure value store, even though most people in most countries don’t need it, is significant. As for the US, payment convenience is an overrated use case for Bitcoin. We already have Apple Pay, credit cards, etc. Why did you decide to buy or sell bitcoin? I grew up playing poker, so was able to easily recognize an “asymetric risk:reward” opportunity. I was comfortable losing 50-100%, especially at that time in my life, for the prospect of a 100-200x gain. Most people failed to see the potential upside, even if unlikely. Haven’t sold yet, but don’t think I have the fortitude to weather a third bear market… I held through the entirety of the last two, but my equity is large enough that a violent selloff seriously messes with my psychological well-being. I no longer want to be that person who wakes up in a cold sweat at 2AM, rolls over, and checks the Bitcoin ticker on their phone. What is the profit margin on luxury cars? Depends on the luxury car company, but Ferrari makes $90k per car and they do so by 1) keeping supply low, and 2) using their brand to build profit centers selling other things like merch or F1 sponsorships. Clearly, limited supply is also a driver of Bitcoin’s price. And a close analogy to Ferrari’s other profit centers, for Bitcoin, would be Layer 2 tech.

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The Need for Reflective Computing Computers need to make reflection as immediate and seamless as going on a thoughtful tangent—the way you would scribble on top of a page or write in the margins. Modern computers are highly biased towards productivity. Everything is about doing more in less time. For matters of simple calculations and menial tasks, this bias is excellent. We can type faster than we can write, do a great deal of complex math in the time it takes a coffee to brew, and communicate with hundreds of people at the speed of light. However, this has failed us in of thought and reflection. In order to maximize throughput, computers had to be fast and show you as many things at a time as possible. The modern office worker is simultaneously sending an email, drafting up a blog post, and tending to a spreadsheet titled all while audio and video blare in the background, and Twitter notifications pop-up. This modern misnomer of multi-tasking means that we rarely engage in deep thinking and focus. depth spreadsheet-final-FINAL-3.xlsx To improve one’s thinking, a different paradigm of speed and access are needed. Rather than being able to look up new media at the speed of light, for instance, we need to be able to commit thoughts as easily. Committing those thoughts and then retrieving them is what I’m calling Reflective Computing. Imagine a scenario where you’re browsing the web and you come across something that reminds you of an important idea or memory. hitting a keyboard shortcut , and writing down this idea. The computer will automatically capture the “moment” alongside the note you took. It will capture the date and time, what you were looking at, what other windows were open, what music was playing, the location  you typed it from, and maybe even the weather. In essence, it’s recreating a much needed for your thoughts which helps with jogging the memory, putting you back in that mind frame, and potentially stimulating even more ideas. cmd + alt + R context This is more than a just a complex note file. In its technical implementation it may be a simple text snippet with some Added metadata, but the classification means these snippets undergo an extra layer of processing. must always be accessible to the computer from anywhere, more like a “helper” than an indexed file. As new are committed, the extra processing will mean the computer will  automatically retrieve others that were similar in content or that  happened in a similar context, allowing for those rich tangents of  thought that we’re going after. Reflections Reflections Reflections Reflective Computing would be a fairly large shift from the modern productivity train of thought. It would ask us to let go of a gratifying sense of “doing things” quickly in favor of the more nuanced activity of “just thinking”. Especially with giants like Google pushing , presenting us with a future where computers will be unavoidable, we will need to be more careful than ever with how we spend our time on these machines. ambient computing

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As we move forward into the age of technology, and as business people, there is one that should always remember. That thing is simply this; the more advanced technology gets, the more danger there is when it comes to cyber threats. One of the biggest concerns for almost any business nowadays is that of their cybersecurity. Knowing what to do in the event of a cyber attack can be baffling for those without the know-how. The new Information Technologies (IT) are trying to develop industrial security systems , which will help protect the most critical information, that is, the most sensitive data that would have a negative impact on an organization, if they arrived to be published intentionally or accidentally. There has never been a more appropriate time than now to pay attention to the need for cybersecurity experts. Making a career switch, and becoming one may be the most fulfilling thing you have ever done. We are going to look more closely today at as a career and what it involves. Cybersecurity Technology Is Cyber Security A Good Career Choice? Cybersecurity is not only a right career choice; it could be one of the most employable positions in the world at the moment. There isn’t a day that goes by where a company does not feel concern about the safety of not only their business but also their customers. Cybersecurity can quite often be responsible for saving the business and is a line of security that requires a skill that is not available enough. When it comes to selecting a career choice that could see you paid handsomely and in no short supply of job offers, this is the career you should consider. What Does A Cyber Security Expert Do? To put what a cybersecurity expert does in simple terms, they secure information and digital files. The job itself is, however, far more complicated than this. The role itself has requirements for testing the infrastructure from the inside of the business. A cybersecurity expert will initially work with the entire workforce in order to establish any possible human leaks of information that can be used to exploit the business and its technology. The role of a cybersecurity expert is almost that of an investigator. It is their job to search every tiny gap in the business in order to reveal vulnerabilities. One they are revealed, the expert then patches the hole. As a result, in order for us to increase the resilience and maturity of cyber security, and why not information security, we need to consider that properly planning investment and staying tuned and constantly learning are key to cyber risk reduction and to take advantage of cyber risk. While we have seen a steady rise in cyber attacks, many companies continue to address information security in an unstructured manner rather than primarily. How To Get A Job In Cyber Security
? Cybersecurity roles that are far more accessible than most people believe they are. Of course, one main route of the entrance is via graduating with a bachelor’s degree. There are, however, companies that do like some hands-on experience when it comes to hiring somebody to fill their cybersecurity needs. As cyber threats become more incessant and malicious, the work of a CISO and its expert team is becoming increasingly difficult, and the challenge of protecting corporate, customer and employee data, along with intellectual property, makes become even more challenging. People hired for these positions must understand how to respond during a cyber-crisis to help mitigate any damage and manage corporate security strategy, along with support and interaction with C-Level. The role itself requires a lot in the way of smarts, so sometimes hiring somebody fresh out of college is not a great idea. The best way to get started in this career is to pair studying with some form of on the job training. This helps in a few ways. Firstly, the experience during your study will make you far more employable. Second, the more experience you have, the higher your salary. wages range starts at $80k and tops out around $158k per year, which is pretty sizeable. This wage, of course, may fluctuate depending on what role you take. Cybersecurity Engineer Perhaps the most important step an organization can take to improve its security is to invest in the qualification of its professionals, value and retain its talents to perform, as well as invest in a comprehensive Information Security risk assessment. This is crucial in understanding the training gaps, staff knowledge, as well as where the greatest vulnerabilities within the organization are and what potential internal and external threats the company may be facing. The use of marketing and the idea that small everyday processes will be made from a worldwide data matrix are the reality of the 20th century. XXI, especially when it is seen in the role of giants like Google, who work with big data and sophisticated artificial intelligence processes. In fact, it can be said that technology has advanced so far, at a breakneck pace, which it is difficult to keep up with all the changes that occur in real time. The business world is at the same time the biggest driver of these changes and the most affected by new technologies, which require new solutions and positioning. Cyber Security Roles There are a few roles you can take in cybersecurity. The role you take would depend on where your strength lies. Here are just a few options: •	Penetration Tester - Tests the framework and security of the business. •	Forensic Analyst - Examine problems at an in-depth level. •	It Security Engineer - Fixes and improves security issues. •	IT Security Consultant - Advises on breaches and how to fix them. There are, of course, many other roles you could take in the cybersecurity field; these are just a few to give you an idea. Conclusion
: Hackers are becoming far more advanced every single day, and they are finding ways to extract information that everyday people would not consider. Cybersecurity has over the last few years become of the most important resources that a business can have access to. Cyber Security is a serious and complex issue, however, there are some security actions that can be implemented with low cost.

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Will the self-driving cars software market drive all of the transportation market? Incumbents in logistics always circle back to the one dashboard solution. If uber can achieve profitability with a large labor force (Dara doesn't definitively say it in the video but he implies it), what can they do with an a super fleet? How costly is a super fleet of self driving cars to buy and maintain and maintain, or to lease? And maintain. And what happens to the current drivers? The self driving cars company may be approaching one of the larger worker displacements events of our time.

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I was recently putting all my old articles in one place online, and I ran across this piece I’d written in the summer of 1993 that had some comments about the job market and the professionalism of HR departments in general. Sadly in the intervening 21 years, the situation has only gotten worse, not better. http://www.thekompany.com/3rd-party-watch-14-1993-august/ I was recently putting all my old articles in one place online, and I ran across this piece I’d written in the summer of 1993 that had some comments about the job market and the professionalism of HR departments in general. Sadly in the intervening years, the situation has only gotten worse, not better. We thought HR software systems would help the HR departments but the heuristics aren’t sophisticated enough and the fact of having the software available, seems to have made many of them lazy. http://www.thekompany.com/3rd-party-watch-14-1993-august/ While I was last at DataWeek, a job fair was held the first night, hosted by Change.org. I, like many people, am always looking around for opportunities, so I attended, both to observe, and to see if something interesting might be going on. What I was struck by was the sheer volume of companies that could not find tech talent, and the sheer volume of tech talent that couldn’t find a job. I felt like I was at a church singles dance were the room is filled with an equal percentage of male and female and everyone is complaining there is no one to dance with. So this got me reflecting on some personal experiences and then I interviewed a number of current and former HR managers to see if my anecdotal observations were essentially correct. Last year I applied online on a Sunday afternoon and got a “thank you, but after careful review of your qualifications, we’ve decided you aren’t a match” 20 minutes later. No human being ever saw the application. It was simply looking for keyword matches, and even if you had described a process that matched their keyword but didn’t use their keyword, neither the software or the HR representative is going to know that because they don’t have an in depth understanding of the position. Recently I modified my resume to match every single keyword on a job req and sent it in on a Friday night. First thing Monday morning they are calling me about the job, they think I’m perfect (this is the HR person) and she wants the hiring manager to talk to me. So I follow up the next day, she sounds sad, she says the hiring manager didn’t see ETL on my resume. ETL is “Extract, Transform, Load” and refers to data. ETL wasn’t a keyword on the job req, however the very first bullet point on my resume talked about extracting data to load to Amazon/eBay and receive orders and confirmations back to load in to the client ERP system. The very definition of ETL, however the hiring manager had no idea what ETL actually was and so was despondent that he didn’t see it on my resume. A very tech savvy recruiter called me recently and we started to discuss this client. The HR department refused the recommendations of the recruiter, asked to see the worst of the candidates, against the advice of the recruiter and all of them were thrown out within a couple minutes by the president of the company in the interview, he was furious at his wasted time, but blamed the recruiter and not HR for doing their job properly. The following are quotes from several HR people that I spoke with, and they really speak for themselves (these people asked for their names and those of their employers to be kept anonymous): “A company of any real size is going to have a recruiting software looking for key words. As an example the company I worked for had 900–1200 employees. With a normal 10% turnover rate that’s 90–120 positions open at any one time. There is no way a single HR person could do that on their own. Another problem is that the recruiter often has little to no understanding of the actual position they are hiring for. They have a list of keywords and are struggling to match with no knowledge of what a “construction apprentice with knowledge of R-34 level calibration” actually does. Another problem is that most of the questions that would tell us if the person is a good fit for the position we’re not legally able to ask. And previous employers can be sued for disparaging remarks, so no one gives out any previous work history information anymore. So we have no idea what kind of an employee you really are. One of our greatest surprises was when we did a poll of our employees and found that our best employees were actually convicted felons. Yep, 90% of the guys that the managers told us were the best had spent time in prison. But if we go looking for felons and someone is actually crazy the company is liable for any damages or injuries that employee inflicts because we as a company should have known they were psycho.” “It all sounds like the solution would be to allow the managers to hire their own employees. That often makes it better for the position but worse for the company. Most of these managers just don’t know the laws or don’t care and violate them right and left. This leaves the company open to huge liabilities. Most lawsuits are a minimum of 10K and that’s when the company has done nothing wrong and the claim is dismissed. If there is any violation or fault at all, it balloons from there.” “Don’t blame the software….blame the user. I think recruiters are busy and just want to fill the job. Sometimes even lazy. I am a dept of 1 and do recruiting. I have a recruiting system but I don’t use the search feature because it produces little or no finds. So I have found I do it old school, yes I open each applicant that applies to the position but I really know within the first few seconds if it is something I want to keep reading or move on. Granted this means I do this at home which equals more work time. However, it pays off as I am able to ID the right person and hopefully they stay and perform well.” “The best employees are referrals. Anyone off the street is going to be a crap shoot whether or not they fit. Employee referral programs are worth their weight in gold. Temp companies can be worth it sometimes depending on turnover because you can try everyone out and easily get rid of the ones that don’t work. With my company we recruited at the local college. The recruiter and HR assistant and two managers went out to their career day. The two HR people could handle the legal side and the managers could handle the personality/experience side. It worked much better than the recruiter alone, but not many companies will pay to have 4 people spending a couple days to hire a couple positions.” We have all these tech companies screaming for more H1B visas and in reality, there is probably plenty of talent right here in the US, but HR is standing in the way of the two active parties in many cases, or lawyers in the way in others. There has to be a better way to connect interested companies with willing talent.

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During dAppcon, a , I had a chance to talk to Rene Reinsberg, founder of Celo. recent conference in Berlin A little background on Celo Celo (meaning “purpose” in esperanto) is a VC-backed project aiming to bring financial services to the unbanked through its own smart contract platform (Celo is a fork of Ethereum). Having already more than $30M, Celo’s main goal is a financial inclusion through easy-to-use stablecoins and a mobile-first approach toward user adoption. Celo Gold is the reserve and governance currency of the protocol - it serves as a proof-of-stake asset and also as one of the backing assets in the stablecoin reserve basket. raised The Interview : Rene, let’s start by giving me the Celo pitch. What’s your ambition with the project? : We started working on Celo about two years ago. We saw a massive gap in terms of the user experience, particularly ease of use of cryptocurrencies. We see cryptocurrencies as a technology that can advance an access to financial products and services, particularly in the developing world. Celo brings a lightweight decentralized identity system which maps hashes of phone numbers to wallets, thereby anyone can send and receive payments based on their phone number.  That greatly reduces the friction as one no longer needs to fiddle with public keys and the user experience is much more similar to Square’s Cash App or Venmo. It also serves as an entry point to a digital identity. We feel the identity part is quite important, as not having any official identity also means not having any credit score and no access to financial products like loans. Also while we were doing our initial research, we realized that people in developing markets were really excited about Bitcoin, but they were also concerned about its volatility - when it comes to payment use case; it’s really powerful as a store of value, of course. : You are developing a stablecoin. How will you ensure the peg holds? How does Celo’s approach compare to existing stablecoins like DAI or planned stablecoins like libra? : First of all, we don’t see any single currency taking over the world and being used everywhere. On the contrary, we see a rich ecology of many different currencies; some of them may look like traditional currencies like euros or dollars, others may be more local or function-specific currencies. We see a much richer ecosystem of currencies which can more accurately map to people’s needs and the societies they live in. Right now we see mostly that stablecoins are backed by what they represent - dollar stablecoins backed by dollars in bank accounts. We separate those two so that the representation and the backing are unrelated. Stablecoins on our platform are overcollateralized, similar to Maker. We use a basket of multiple crypto assets including our own reserve asset, Celo Gold. Through onchain governance, it's possible to introduce additional stablecoins. We foresee a creation of Celo Peso or a stablecoin pegged to the economy in Berlin. All the stablecoins will be backed by the shared reserve - there are nice properties coming out of that from the stability perspective. For anyone interested, we published a describing these properties in more detail. : So if I understand correctly there’s a shared pool of assets backing various stablecoins on the Celo platform. Who decides what kind of assets get to be in the basket? : In the long-term the rebalancing of the cryptoassets in the reserve basket will happen purely onchain through onchain governance. But so far we don’t have the tools to make that viable, so in the short-term, the rebalancing of the reserve basket will be done manually. : Could you go into more detail about the Celo architecture and what role does the Celo gold play? : Celo is a fork of geth, so architecturally you could think of Celo Gold as an equivalent of ETH and the stablecoins as an equivalent of ERC-20. Gas costs on Celo can be paid in stablecoins, which reduces the complexity for the users. Celo is running on permissionless Istanbul BFT, meaning it’s a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. The key characteristics of Celo are the identity and stability protocols, but we are also keeping the EVM compatibility, so it’s very easy to deploy Ethereum apps on top of Celo. : Could you describe the redeeming mechanism? How can the holder of Celo stablecoin get the underlying asset? KryptoJoseph (KJ) Rene Reinsberg (RR) KJ RR stability white paper KJ RR KJ RR KJ : Celo stablecoins are crypto-collateralized, so it’s not a straightforward process like with fiat-based stablecoins. But we still wanted the holders to have an option to redeem. What we came up with is an integration of an exchange directly into the protocol. The exchange is a Uniswap-style constant-product exchange with Celo Gold / Celo dollar as the initial trading pair. Stablecoin holders can always exchange 1 Celo dollar for 1 US dollar worth of Celo gold and the other way around. We have described the mechanism in more detail . : When is Celo launching? : We launched our testnet and SDK recently. We adopted a mobile-first approach to development, since many of our potential end users are just on mobile devices. Most of today’s dApps are web-based, but with our SDK, anyone can build a truly native mobile app that is running on fully decentralized infrastructure. : Do you plan a business development targeting any specific countries or regions in the developing world? : The team building Celo mainly seems itself providing the infrastructure and providing the resources and support for others  to build the applications, which is also why we launched the SDK as one of the first things. Some of the first use cases that we think that would work really well on our platform are things like institutional cash transfer programs. We’ve had several organizations already reach out to us with the intention to try the platform. For example, launch an universal basic income pilot in Liberia. There’s a lot of research showing that cash transfers are the best way of providing aid, but given that a lot of potential recipients don’t have bank accounts or any access to financial services, the operational challenges and costs of running these programs are quite high. So the idea with Celo as the underlying infrastructure for running these programs is that you only have to know the recipients’ phone numbers and you can distribute the payments. Cash transfers can also be done more frequently and in smaller payments. It’s fast, secure and with lower transaction fees. Once there is an active user base, it’s going to be very interesting to start building the DeFi stack on top, to provide an access to loans and other financial services. The loans provided may be small, for example for $10 only, but the impact of such microloans is huge in the developing countries. RR on our blog KJ RR KJ RR we’re helping Give Directly Read the Celo whitepaper here . Read about a16z's motivation to invest in Celo here . Follow Rene at https://twitter.com/followrene . . Follow me at https://twitter.com/KryptoJoseph

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For the last several years, companies across a variety of industries have been pouring money into blockchain research in the hopes of getting in on the ground floor of the next big tech wave. There have been developments in blockchain uses in everything from to , and even in . For all of the spending, however, there haven't been all that many high-profile big-business use cases to really make a splash, with most of the development happening in behind-the-scenes applications that most people will never see. POS systems for small restaurants supply chain systems pharmaceutical compliance The only real exception is within the industry where blockchain technology first rose to international prominence: global finance. As the underlying technology that makes all cryptocurrencies work, it's only natural that the financial industry would make good use of the blockchain before anyone else. For an update on how blockchain is changing the world of finance for the better, here are three use cases that illustrate the point. Making Currency Trades More Efficient Photo: snowing12 / Adobe Stock The first and some would say most important area in finance where blockchain is making big strides is within the realm of currency trading. Already, companies like have made it possible for traders to deal in pairs made up of fiat and cryptocurrencies, uniting traditional monetary instruments with the latest in digital technology. That's not the only way blockchain's impacting currency markets though. CryptoRocket Big global banks are also using blockchain to conduct financial transaction settlements in real-time. The most notable example comes from HSBC, whose blockchain-based FX Everywhere platform has already handled in transactions for the banking giant. The new platform has proven so reliable and efficient that plans are already in the works to open it up for use by large institutional currency traders, and to individuals further down the line. When that happens, it will mark one of the biggest blockchain success stories in the financial industry to date. more than $250 billion Linking Central Banks Together Photo: number1411 / Adobe Stock One of the biggest issues that plagues the global banking industry is the difficulty that arises when moving money across international borders. That's because there's no centralized information store that can transmit authenticated transaction information that can satisfy local compliance needs, such as know-your-customer regulations and the like. As a result, the current system suffers from slowdowns related to information and authentication requests as transactions go through local oversight. Now, however, crypto-platform aims to change that with a truly global blockchain system for international financial transactions. The platform, backed by a consortium of 14 international banks, aims to create tokens of 5 major fiat currencies, with a separate system for each jurisdiction. The big innovation, though, would be that each system would have a direct link to the jurisdiction's central bank, providing instant transaction settlement capabilities in an IaaS solution accessible to all major banks. In one fell swoop, the system would revolutionize cross-border currency transactions and slash overhead in dramatic fashion. Fnality Establishing Identity Worldwide Photo: greenbutterfly / AdobeStock Last, and perhaps most significant is the effort by professional services giant Accenture and Microsoft to create a system. At first glance, such a system would appear to have little to do with global finance, but it may finally solve one of the biggest issues that the industry faces – the fact that lack the documentation they need to use traditional financial services. blockchain-based global identification 31% of all adults worldwide The system, which aims to fulfill the and a key provision of the United Nations' sustainable development goals could enable the global financial industry to nearly double its' market almost overnight. It uses a combination of biometric data and traditional identification sources (government documents, etc.) to provide a portable, multinational blockchain identity database. For the financial industry, as well as for participants, the system could be a complete game-changer that has the power to set off a renaissance of economic empowerment and development across the world. mission of ID2020 The Native Home of Blockchain Photo: denisismagilov / Adobe Stock The real-world blockchain systems discussed here should make it plain that the global financial industry is the real and undisputed home of blockchain technology. It's the place where there's been the most production-ready development of blockchain systems, the greatest investment, and the clearest use cases. Without a doubt, it is there that the average person will likely come into contact with blockchain technology first and potentially in life-changing ways. That would go a long way toward fulfilling the promise of blockchain's initial purpose – to provide financial power and freedom to all, at all levels of the global economy.

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3 Major Use Cases That Prove Global Finance is the Master of Blockchain

I was pursuing computer science and systems engineering. Honestly, I wanted to mesmerize people around me with my knowledge of something that my fellow students and professors didn’t know. You know, I wanted to be the talking guy in the coffee cup conversations. I tried hacking. I installed a dual boot on my Windows machine with Kali Linux. I was a renegade who’d let his computer break down. That Sony Vaio laptop I got was gold to me at that time. But who cares. I tried everything that I could do on that laptop, who cares in the end anyway. But I was stupid, trying those funny YouTube hacking videos day and night and was unable to hack my own wifi router. It sucked, what kind of hacker can’t even hack his own wifi router? I read excessively about everything that came my way. One day, millions of Bitcoins were seized when the FBI shut down Silk Road, I read, four years ago. Bitcoin? What is it? Who cares, anyway? Maybe I should try and build something like . Not for facilitating geeky drug peddlers though. But to understand if I can build such a thing in the Tor network. Silk Road Like I failed hacking nothing with Kali Linux, I too did fail at building that fancy, super-secretive site on the dark web. What’s next? Huh, Bitcoin. Let’s see what that fancy thing is. Then, the term ‘Bitcoin’ threw a ripple effect. I couldn’t sleep until I knew what it was. Eventually, my pursuit of knowledge and the zeal to impress my fellow students and professors led me to read the — the name felt like Japanese mishmash. original Bitcoin paper authored by Satoshi Nakamoto It was something crazy. Nobody can control it. Felt like Bitcoin was something I should own and save it. When the central banks around the world would screw it all, I’d be safe. Yeah, I’m skeptical about central banks: whose interests are they serving, why do they stimulate the economy without letting it flourish on its own, and why the US dollar is the most powerful currency on the planet, and why RBI — the central bank of India — maintains foreign reserves and tethers its value to the foreign currencies. Of course, trade between countries is essential. But why in a specific currency like USD, GBP, or Euro, which central banks can print without practical limits. And the purchasing power of these fiat currencies — especially Indian Rupee — goes down by an average of 6%. For all the folks who say Bitcoin transaction fees are high, do you know merchants bear a 2% transaction fee whenever you swipe your fancy MasterCard or Visa credit card. If merchants are absorbing these transaction costs and letting it affect their bottom line, don’t you think they will include that cost in what they’re selling? Okay, for all the folks who say Bitcoin is harming the world by consuming hours and hours of electricity for doing mining, do you have a better alternative — that is a more fair mechanism than Bitcoin — for everyone around the globe? You see, when you get a disease, you don’t kill yourself, you try to cure yourself. By the way, pharma is big business; that’s for another story.  Do you have a solution that can cure the huge resource wastage — which is your thinking totally — that can support the Bitcoin ecosystem? What, you don’t? Can you please shut up? That’s where everything started. But after my graduation, I almost forgot about it; knowing nothing I can do with the knowledge I have acquired. And that knowledge dispersing didn't get me anywhere other than some buzz for me around the batchmates. I was never a programmer. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t do it. Maybe hours and hours of tweaking and rewriting the code all day staring at a computer screen wasn’t for me. I know you programmers, some of you are so much more efficient and are enjoying programming, but my DNA is different. After my graduation, I was desperate to get a job. I got an offer as associate QA analyst; I jumped into the bandwagon without giving it a second thought. Yeah, the title’s fancy, and it’s boring; I didn't know why the heck I was pushing some buttons and writing some manual test cases for the sake of some money. The writing part felt good, though. I was an avid reader of Medium and Hacker Noon. Three years back, most of the content was about writing and personal development. Reading those articles for hours propelled me to take action and become a writer. I started developing some writing skills, not so serious. Just putting my troubled thoughts on the screen. And that felt good and helped me move forward when a million questions were drowning me down. One fine day, when nothing was happening for me, I thought I should do some freelance writing. I looked for clients on UpWork. Could not crack it as I created a generic writer profile with no sample writings to show. A couple months after, I gave it a thought. And made my writing profile specific to Bitcoin, blockchain, and crypto. Lucky for me, a client from Israel signed me up for a paid assignment. He wanted to see my ability before giving regular work. I couldn’t forget that. It took me one day to research and understand Ripple (XRP) and to deliver that 300-word article. The Israeli client liked the work; after dealing with a lot of crappy writing, my quality of work — which isn’t earth-shattering — was good enough to do the job for him. That’s how my journey of exploring Bitcoin and blockchain tech began. What's yours?

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My Journey From University to Cryptocurrency 

A 30 line piece of script can finally provide a good solution for a repository pattern in Laravel apps. Link to Github page The problem Laravel provides a beautiful way to query your database through Eloquent, an Object Relational Mapping. The moment your project becomes larger there starts to rise a problem. The difference between entities and models start to become vague. Let me give you an example: We have two methods, one called and one called . findByName concatName ; \ \ \ ; { $table = ; { ->whereName($name)
                    ->whereIsPublished( )
                    ->first();
    } { ->attributes[ ] . . ->attributes[ ];
    }
} <?php namespace App use Illuminate Database Eloquent Model class Product extends Model /**
     * The table associated with the model.
     *
     * string
     */ @var protected 'products' /**
     * Find published product by name
     * string $name
     * Product
     */ @param @return public : function findByName (string $name) Product return $this 1 /**
     * Say we want to concat the name and a category name
     * string 
     */ @return public : function concatName () string return $this 'name' ' - ' $this 'category_name' What we are actually doing here is mixing methods for retrieving (collections of) Products, with methods for instances of 1 Product. A much cleaner approach would be to separate them into 2 different classes. One for obtaining instances and collections of models and one for the model definition itself. You might call this the repository pattern. Splitting into 2 classes There are several libraries for Laravel to start using the repository pattern. One thing that’s a huge disadvantage to me is that you can’t use Eloquent functions on your repositories. Since Eloquent is a huge reason why I am using Laravel I still wanted to be able to use Eloquent on repositories for obtaining models. The solution I created a very simple piece of code which enables on your repositories. This way you can use the repository pattern in a way which is fun and keep your models and your repositories clean! A repository with the use of would look like this: all the features of Eloquent laravel-repositories \ ; \ \ ; \ ; \ \ \ ; { ; $model; { ->model = app(Product::class);
    } { this->whereIsPublished( )
                   ->whereSku($sku)
                   ->first();
    }
} <?php namespace App Repositories use App Models Product use MrAtiebatie Repository use Illuminate Database Eloquent Model /**
 * Product repository
 */ class ProductRepository extends Model use Repository /**
     * The model being queried.
     *
     * \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model
     */ @var protected /**
     * Constructor
     */ public function __construct () $this /**
     * Find published products by SKU
     * {int} $sku
     * {Product}
     */ @param @return public : function findBySku (int $sku) Product return 1 By the use of the Repository trait and the property, knows which model to query and where to use Eloquent and where to use your own repository methods. $model laravel-repositories With this definition of the repository we can now use it in our controllers, jobs, commands etc: $router->get( , { $productRepo->all()->dd(); $productRepo->findBySku( )->name; $productRepo->first()->category;

}); <?php /**
 * In your routes/web.php
 */ '/' function (\App\Repositories\ProductRepository $productRepo) // Use any Eloquent feature directly // Use your custom repository methods echo 12345 // You can even query relations echo Link to Github page Go try it out and leave me some feedback for improvement! I’m currently working on Laravel Pigeon, a notification center for communicating with your users and debugging notifications. Sign up for early access!

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My Laravel Repository Pattern Solution (in only 30 lines of code)

For several years now the United States has witnessed an unprecedented boom in the size and complexity of the technology sector. The rise has been so sharp that at one point the five largest tech companies here accounted for in the S&P 500 stock index. These results have kept the overall economy humming along, even in the face of worsening global economic indicators. 37% of the growth There is one thing, however, that threatens to take the wind out of the US tech industry's sails (and no, it isn't ). It's the fact that the industry is creating new jobs much faster than the educational sector can provide new, high-skilled workers. The demand for labor is so high, that the US Department of Labor expects the industry to require about by 2026, which represents growth well over the average for other economic sectors. Here's a look at what's going on, and what one immigration SaaS firm is doing to try and fill the industry's needs. the threat of Congressional oversight 557,100 additional workers Solving a Key Labor Hurdle is an immigration-focused SaaS firm that offers a variety of solutions for both companies and experts that need to navigate through the often-labyrinthine US immigration system.  Their automated screening tool for talents who can qualify for the O-1 visa is exceptionally accurate and so far has been able to correctly gauge candidates who could qualify for the process. The correct analysis of a candidate is extremely important as the qualified talents need to meet the US government’s criteria for extraordinary abilities. A few of the criteria they need to meet include- industry recognition, top leadership roles at previous organizations and awards. Although PassRight has a system in place to find the right candidates,  sadly the majority of the best candidates come from developing nations like India and Pakistan and eastern Europe and have little or no money to go through the whole visa process all over again. PassRight This is just where PassRight aims to change the equation. In association with the , the firm now offers a program that they call an income sharing agreement (ISA). In short, the program provides financing for would-be O-1 applicants to cover all of the costs associated with a move to the US. That means funds for the application itself, as well as to secure housing, transportation, and personal needs. In exchange, the applicant agrees to a 24-month repayment plan that's dependent on their future salary. Global Talent Fund Disrupting the Status Quo PassRight program differs from others in the tech immigration industry. Their goal is to bring top-tier tech talents to US businesses that so desperately need them by making a real investment in the individuals that have the right skills. Although there's a profit motive, the program depends on the success of the people that use it. For that reason, repayment schedules require candidates to pay 17% of their salary for a period of 24 months, until they reach a cap of USD 30,000 or whichever is lower. If they lose their job, the repayments stop until they find another tech firm to bring them on. The program's structure should open up access to the O-1 visa program to applicants from a much wider range of places where there are existing talent reservoirs yet to be tapped by the US tech sector. By eliminating the financial barriers that would have otherwise made relocations impossible for so many, PassRight may end up creating a thriving pipeline of tech talent that can help quench the demand here in the US. If they succeed, they may help stave off a day of reckoning for an industry that has so far defied every obstacle placed before it. Relief is in Sight For the US tech industry, anything that helps relieve the pressure of the current labor market would be welcome. Already, industry analysts are for the sector that should worsen with each passing year – and a dearth of skilled labor is to blame. Of course, the efforts of a single company helping skilled foreigners to find their way into the waiting arms of US tech firms may not be enough to prevent further slowdowns, but it does provide an example for others to follow. For that reason, it wouldn't be surprising to see others in the immigration field or even the US tech firms themselves looking to emulate the PassRight model to the flow of foreign workers into the country. Together, they could finally solve the problems of the labor-starved US tech sector, which would be a great outcome for all involved. predicting a decline in growth increase Photo credits via contributor's Adobe Stock license by metamorworks, Viacheslav Iakobchuk, and PassRight website.

As Tech Labor Shortages Worsen, One Immigration SaaS Firm Plots a Solution

Founders create startups for all sorts of reasons. Often, the motivation is a mix between the founders’ desires to do well for themselves and to do something worthwhile for others. Dreams of greatness might figure in there too. Rarely, however, is the overriding reason to build a company people want to get rid of. But that is what the startup pipeline is designed to produce. When a startup company takes early investment, typically the expectation is that everyone is working toward one of two “exit” events: selling the company to a bigger company or selling to retail investors in an initial public offering. In either case, the startup is a hot potato. One group of investors buys in order to sell to another group of investors who buy in to sell to the fools down the road. There’s something sort of pyramid-scheme-ish about all this. The exit event, also, is often the beginning of the end of any positive social vision that the company might have held. What if startups had the option to mature in a way that gets them out of the investors’ hamster wheel? In the coming months, I will be exploring strategies and stories that could help create a new option for startups: Exit to community. In E2C, the company would transition from investor ownership to ownership by the people who rely on it most. Those people might be users, workers, customers, participant organizations, or a combination of such stakeholder groups. The mechanism for co-ownership might be a cooperative, a trust, or even crypto-tokens. The community might own the whole company when the process is over, or just a substantial-enough part of it to make a difference. When a startup exits to community, founders should see enough of a reward that they feel their risk and hard work was worth it. Investors should see a fair return for their risk. Most importantly, the key stakeholders should know the company is worthy of their trust and ongoing investment because they co-own it. For a social-media company, this might mean that users have a meaningful say in how their private data is or isn’t used. For a gig platform, it might mean that the gig workers co-determine their working conditions and what is done with the profits they produce. These kinds of outcomes could help prevent the massive accountability crises that now beset today’s most successful venture-backed startups. One way to begin exploring E2C could be by identifying a subset of startups in venture capital portfolios that lie in “zombie” territory—somewhere between failure and exit-ready. Investor owners would benefit from having a new way of liquidating investments that would otherwise lie dormant. In some cases, the community might be in a position to buy the company with cash on hand—especially if it came back to them in later savings or profits. In other cases, E2C might be financed externally on the expectation of future growth, as is generally done for employee-ownership conversions using an Employee Stock Ownership Plan. Startups might also plan ahead for E2C by identifying particular guardrails that keep this option open as they negotiate their early rounds of financing. As with —and with —a targeted policy intervention may be necessary to make this kind of financing attractive enough to be feasible. These possibilities and more are the kinds of things I’ve been thinking about and would like to think about with others. the ESOP the venture capital industry itself Why not, you might ask, just begin these startups under community ownership? This is certainly an option, and it’s one that I have enthusiastically supported through the ty and through co-founding the . But getting going under community ownership doesn’t seem like the right approach in many cases. #PlatformCoop communi Start.coop accelerator Ambitious startups are a risky endeavor, and it may not be fair to distribute that risk with early-stage participants. Also, startups usually need to make a few dramatic pivots early in their life, and having a large community of co-owners would make those hard decisions more difficult than if a small, high-trust group of founders is in charge. Centralizing the risk and responsibility early on is a reasonable strategy for startups. Later, once the company has found its market and its footing, the transition to accountable community ownership will better suit the nature of the business. With E2C, we get the best of both worlds—the dynamic startup, then the accountable, sustainable public asset. For me, this vision came together in conversations with social enterprise lawyer (who has participated in some exits to community), along with sources of inspiration that include , , , and the . Now it is time to bring more people into the conversation. Jason Wiener Zebras Unite ESOP inventor Louis Kelso platform cooperativism steward-ownership network Our team at the at the University of Colorado Boulder is looking for collaborators on this work. This includes entrepreneurs, activists, investors, policy advocates, researchers, and more. Do you want to join us? what you’d want your E2C to look like. Media Enterprise Design Lab Let us know

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Startups Need a New Option: Exit to Community

Let’s say you wanted to download all of the high quality Super Nintendo ROMs from a website. The site simply has a list of links that take you to the file itself. Since this is a flat tree, you could run a basic wget command with the URL ala: hypothetically wget -m -np -c -w 3 -R "index.html*" "https://rom-site.blah/path/to/roms/" However, this would give you every game, regardless of quality. Fortunately, ROM enthusiasts use suffixes to denote the status of roms: [a] Alternate
[p] Pirate
[b] Bad Dump     (avoid these, they may not work!)
[t] Trained
[f] Fixed
[T-] OldTranslation
[T+] NewerTranslation
[h] Hack
(-) Unknown Year
[o] Overdump
[!] Verified Good Dump
(M ( (??k) ROM Size
ZZZ_ Unclassified
(Unl) Unlicensed #) Multilanguage (# of Languages) ###) Checksum So we just want the ones with the suffix. . [!] You may also want to specify [U] for just the US releases as well There is certainly some way of specifying this to with a regular expression, but I am definitely no or regex pro, so after a few minutes of unsuccessful attempts, I gave up and wrote a short Python script to get me what I wanted using wget wget Beautiful Soup Before writing any code I analyzed the source of the target URL, and sure enough, the page was pretty much just a list of anchor tags, with a direct link to the ROM file. Perfect. After peeking at the , I know I just need to extract the links from all the anchors, but only collect the ones containing the [!] suffix. This can be done in less than 15 lines of Python: html First, install beautifulsoup4: pip3 install beautfilsoup4 And then create a file called with the following code: good_roms.py requests bs4 BeautifulSoup

weburl = data = requests.get(weburl)
soup = BeautifulSoup(data.text, features= )

links = [] anch soup.find_all( ): str(anch):
        links.append(weburl + anch.get( )) link links:
    print(link) # good_roms.py import from import 'https://site.site/path/to/roms/' 'html.parser' for in 'a' if '[!]' in 'href' for in Now I can just run the program and redirect the output to a text file: python3 good_roms.py > rom-list.txt Now that I have a text file with the URLs of all the good ROMs, I can give that file directly to and it will download just the good ones using the input file switch: wget -i wget -i rom-list.txt That’s it! Make sure you have enough space for all the roms and watch them pile up one at a time: --2019-01-25 21:27:02--  https://rom-site.blah/path/to/roms/YourFavoriteRom[!].bin
Reusing existing connection to [rom-site.blah]:443.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 2097152 (2.0M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: ‘YourFavoriteRom[!].bin’

YourFavoriteRom[!].bin 100%[========================>]   2.00M   513KB/s 3.9s    

2019-01-25 21:27:09 (513 KB/s) - ‘YourFavoriteRom[!].bin’ saved [2097152/2097152]

FINISHED --2019-01-25 21:29:41--
Total wall clock time: 38m 47s
Downloaded: 693 files, 888M 30m 38s (495 KB/s) in in

Nintendo

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Scraping a Website for High-Quality ROMs Using Python

Lewis shares lessons learned from his time on the other side of the table as a VC of Metamorphic Ventures. Email overload is real. But while virtual mailboxes have become increasingly overcrowded, physical mail is almost an endangered species. Less mail means that people have more mindshare available for any physical mail they receive. For , this trend presented a major marketing opportunity, and he founded to seize on it. do Lewis Gersh PebblePost The company tracks customer activity online and then transforms it into a personalized piece of mail sent directly to the user’s home. “Brands have told us we invented a new channel,” says Lewis, who previously founded a VC firm that funded companies specializing in data-driven marketing. “Much like there was search or social, there’s now programmatic direct mail.” Over four years, Lewis has raised about $81 million to grow PebblePost. Based on our conversation, here are his top tips for successful fundraising. Face your headwinds — head on With decades of experience under his belt — as both an entrepreneur and investor — Lewis had a good foundation when he started fundraising for PebblePost. But even with enviable relationships and connections, fundraising for PebblePost wasn’t as simple as snapping his fingers. “Some people would just barf immediately,” Lewis says. “One of my buddies, who’s at a large venture fund and who shall remain nameless, said, ‘Great, just what the world needs: automated junk mail.’” Other investors didn’t quite see it that way. Lewis helped them see the same potential he did for PebblePost. To win over investors, Lewis recommends telling a story about your company that accounts for the inevitable headwinds. “There are things every entrepreneur will have if they’re honest with themselves in their venture — macroeconomic, geopolitical, incumbents in the space — risks going on at that point in time for that sector,” he says. Those are the headwinds. When Lewis first started raising money for PebblePost, junk mail — and how much everyone it — was a hot topic thanks to Restoration Hardware, which had the enlightened idea of mailing to customers’ homes. Plus, there were rumors that USPS was on the verge of going bankrupt. hates 17-pound catalogs Adding to the issues of the day, “nobody had ever raised early-stage venture for a direct mail venture,” Lewis notes. “So no successful exits.” “I chose not to try and defend those issues,” he says of PebblePost’s headwinds. Instead, he focused on painting a picture of the opportunity and why it was worth the risks. “Coming up with a very simple, catchy phrase was critical,” Lewis advises. “I would go into my pitches saying, ‘I have a seven-syllable pitch for $1 billion opportunity,’” Lewis says. “Programmatic, direct mail.” That initial soundbite, Lewis says, should be something that an investor can repeat and something that makes them think. Then, you move on to your 20-second elevator pitch. In Lewis’ case, the pitch included four pithy points: “It’s the largest ad spend next to TV, the highest response rate of any media, has had no new product in 25 years, and is a fragmented ecosystem.” ”That was my exact talk track when I’d get them on the phone. Those four things are a dream of an area to disrupt for an average early-stage VC.” Be creative and memorable, grasshopper Drawing on his decade at Metamorphic Ventures, the seed-stage fund he founded, Lewis has strong feelings about pitch decks. “Showing up in a room and having a pitch deck is probably mandatory,” Lewis says. “You should do it. But they should be about visuals to enhance the story — not scripts.” After sitting through literally thousands of presentations full of dry statistics and graphs, Lewis says he remembered few pitches he saw as an investor. “Five percent or less would show up and have amazing visuals — not charts and graphs,” Lewis says. “It really would resonate so much more. What’s the feeling, the emotion, the psychology?” The pitch deck isn’t everything, though — you can (and should) find other ways to be memorable. For PebblePost, Lewis walked into meetings with investors, threw down a stack of postcards on the table, and announced that they were worth more than Google Adwords. “It would grab their attention and create a fun intro,” Lewis says. “Like let’s go old school, let’s have a discussion. I’ll get you a deck because I know you need to send it to your partners, but it doesn’t have to command the meeting.” In fact, Lewis recommends that a half-hour of your meeting should be spent on discussion. The pitch deck should only take about 20 minutes. After a few pitches, Lewis says, you should know most of the questions you’ll be asked and incorporate those into your presentation to steer the direction of the conversation. Follow-up and communicate FTW After sitting in on so many pitch meetings, Lewis knows how to read his fellow VCs. “The one way you know for sure when there’s a pass coming,” Lewis says. “If they say good luck at the end of the meeting, you’re dead meat. You want them saying, ‘This is amazing. How can we meet again?’” But either way, Lewis says, it’s best to follow up and to do so quickly. “You have a week to really make an impact before the next partner meeting,” Lewis says. In an ideal world, entrepreneurs would have their pick of investors. But it doesn’t usually work out that way. “People say, choose your investors carefully,” Lewis says. “You’re building a relationship. It’s a marriage, blah, blah, blah. … The truth is most entrepreneurs get to pick their investor “dream team.” They have to go with whoever is willing to lead.” don’t Even if you don’t get your preferred investor, Lewis advises building up and protecting the relationship. The best way to do that? Communication. “Investors love good news and they can handle bad news,” Lewis says. “They will not tolerate surprises. Give them advance notice on . Good, bad, indifferent.” everything Early on, you want to do a monthly and you can communicate with less frequency as you get bigger. Visibility and transparency are essential for building relationships with investors, Lewis says. investor update “Getting the communication right is critical.” Nathan Beckord is the CEO of Foundersuite.com , a software platform that has helped entrepreneurs raise over $1.2 billion in seed and venture capital since 2016. This article is based on an episode of Foundersuite’s How I Raised It podcast , a behind-the-scenes look at how startup founders have raised capital.

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Software for raising capital

Nominated for 2022 - HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - Founder Stories

Nominated for 2022 - HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - Entrepreneurship

How to Raise Funds Successfullly 3 Tips from VC-Turned-Entrepreneur Lewis Gersh

Governments are not fond of cryptos, ça va sans dire. Every crypto enthusiast knows well that big nations as the USA or Japan are trying to regulate the cryptomarket, undeniably growing in power and popularity, but that also keep a certain distance from fully implementing cryptos in the national or global finance. Libra is a clear example of this: when Facebook started the project the fear that its cryptocurrency could undermine the financial order led to the slowdown of the project. It doesn’t matter whether it is a stablecoin and, thus, has a certain dependence on fiat money. States are not willing to have such a strong financial competition. Nonetheless, many believe that one day the biggest nations on the global chessboard might finally embrace the cryptocommunity and start looking at virtual money as an opportunity rather than a threat. For instance, China, one of the starkest opponents to cryptocurrency, has lately changed its mind and might even launch some time in the near future. its own crypto However, there is one nation that, despite all the odds, is already actively trying to implement a state-backed, official cryptocurrency - the first of a kind in the history of cryptos. And it is not any of the financial giants you might think of. The Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), a tiny state of slightly over 53,000 people spread across 24 inhabited atolls in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, has declared its intentions to issue a new currency, the (SOV, in short), which will be used alongside the US Dollar, the current currency of the country. Marshallese Sovereign Photo by Winston Chen on Unsplash The project, led by David Paul, Minster In-Assistance to the President, is aimed at greater involvement of the Islands to the global economy. “The advent of blockchain technology has opened up a world of opportunity for small nations like ours. Relying on traditional fiat currency, the Marshall Islands has only fragile links to the wider world of international finance, and compliance is extremely resource intensive,” Mr. Paul in an essay published on CoinDesk. has stated “Many of our citizens send or receive money using remittance services, paying fees of up to 10% per transaction,” while “blockchain transactions are fast, simple, and cheap.” But most importantly “they’re replicated throughout a decentralized network.” Indeed, the step toward the development towards a crypto would bring two main advantages to the economy of the Marshall Islands and its people: 1) it would allow a larger freedom for a state which is dependant on the USD and the monetary policies of the US; and 2) it will provide a stronger infrastructure for a state the citizens of which live on several, scattered islands. The outline of the SOV seems to be extremely interesting: it is an actual crypto, rather than a stablecoin, since it is not pegged to any other fiat currency. However, although decentralisation is a main goal, the currency is backed by a central, political authority, granting stability and legal compliance, which cryptos don’t always enjoy. For instance, it is in the development plan that the SOV will follow Milton Friedman’s k% rule, with a fixed growth of 4% every year: “We chose to create a fixed money supply with fixed growth because fiat currencies can be remarkably unstable. For example, the Argentine peso recently fell 15% in a single day, while Venezuela’s currency, for all intents and purposes, no longer functions at all. [...] We as governments need to take a more sustainable approach to money, and not treat it as a limitless resource.” Image taken on CoinDesk The SOV will start rolling out in 2021, with an initial issuance of tokens redistributed between the government and a fund for the development of the SOV itself. Of the initial issuance, the government will retain 80% to redistribute them between the citizens and the SOV Development Fund. While the other 20% will be halved: 10% to be put on the market and 10% to be used “to build and maintain the in the short and long term.'' SOV technology The announcement and the issuance year are not random: As we saw above, the Republic of the Marshall Islands is heavily dependant on the US. Military bases employ many citizens of the Islands and the struggle with rising sea levels is mainly funded by American foreign aid. However, the current agreements foresee the end of financial support by 2023. The Marshall Islands is, thus, faced with a choice: it could still remain dependant on a foreign country or gain economic sovereignty, alongside actual political independence - from a country that conducted tens of nuclear experiments and detonations on its territory, with effects still suffered by the population. Obviously, the US did not let this happen smoothly and happily. After the passage of the bill in the Marshallese Nitijela (Parliament) for the creation of the currency (in February 2018), the political giant understood how committed was the RMI in the project. , the US ambassador expressed her country’s concern and disappointment for not having been consulted before the final decision of the Nitijela. A couple of weeks later, Paul and the Minister of Finance Brenson Wase - together with other officials - were called to testify before the US Treasury. There is no need to say how the Treasury did not approve of the project and raised many concerns on money laundering and terrorism funding. On April 11 2018 The International Monetary Fund on terrorism as well, but also on the success of the project: if the project should fly, it could pose the Marshall Islands in an embarassing situation where other states and financial istitutions - as the First Hawaiian Bank, the only bank to have close relations with the nation - would cut them off extrenal aid. also expressed its concerns Although the international community managed to slow the project down, the essay published on CoinDesk by Mr. Paul just over a week ago shows how the Islands has not given up the will to carry out the project. This will definitely become a major debate in the cryptocommunity and in global summits, as well as a major concern for financial giants as the US or the IMF. However, we should remember that we are dealing with the future of an island country that struggles with poor financial ties and with raising water levels - which could drown the entire nation! Action is required. And for a nation that has a very long history of decentralised economy and community, a blockchain-based, fast, and secure coin might be of use, as worrying as it is for the conservative, traditional finance.

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Sharing the trade-offs between each method of trading “Alt season will never happen again” While that is true to a certain extent, the notion that Bitcoin will be the ONLY cryptocurrency to have any value in the future is really stretching it. While most altcoins have experienced a 90% price drop from their all-time high, (or in some cases, ICO price) selected altcoins still have a future. , of Cryptocurrencies by the masses are a few reasons for us to experience a second “alt season”, although in a different form. Product development increasing knowledge While deciding on which altcoins to invest in is a favorite topic of discussion with everyone in the space, this article focuses on the best ways to trade altcoins. Factors Of Measurement Admittedly, this question of the best method of trading altcoins may not be as “sexy” as the question of which altcoin to trade, but it is still important. It not only determines the amount of profit you can make, it determines how likely you are to lose your altcoins, a very possible scenario. So how are we going to measure each method of trading altcoins? These are some metrics to consider when deciding for yourself Level of convenience Level of security Level of decentralization Price levels Commission fees Liquidity With that, let us take a look at the usual suspects and other methods! Fiat To Crypto Channels Despite being touted as the replacement for cash, it is ironic that Cryptocurrency is bought with fiat. While mass adoption will change this situation in the future, fiat to Crypto channels are still the entry points for newcomers in the space. You can buy Cryptocurrency on , , and any major exchanges that partner payment channels. Coinbase Gemini Exchange Bitcoin ATMs Convenient and widely available in most countries, these platforms charge relatively and require you to perform (know your customer) process. high commission fees KYC Furthermore, very , with Bitcoin and Ethereum being the main tokens available for purchase. few altcoins can be purchased with fiat If you are someone who is strongly against KYC processes or wants to purchase an altcoin that is still relatively unknown, this channel is not for you. Trading On Centralized Exchanges If you own a significant amount of Bitcoin and Ether, Centralized Exchanges offer to buy the altcoin of your choice. one of the fastest methods Every altcoin is traded against either BTC, ETH, or any such as USDT on centralized exchanges. This gives you a wide variety of options when it comes to your altcoin trading. stable coins In general, Centralized Exchanges charge a relatively low commission fee, around and an additional withdrawal fee. 0.1–0.2% trading fees However, there are a few things to take note when trading on centralized exchanges. Firstly, there is always a as your altcoins are held in “hot wallets” in your exchange account. Even Binance, one of the biggest exchanges in the world experienced a this year. significant security threat security hack of 7,000 Bitcoins Secondly, certain Centralized Exchanges are known to carry out . For example, they “pump and dump” altcoins with lower volume. trading manipulation Furthermore, they can manipulate the order books to earn from the spread and delete open orders right before you execute yours. These factors lead to a number of users preferring decentralized exchanges to the centralized ones. Decentralized Exchanges Last but definitely not the least, trading on decentralized exchanges is another option to trade altcoins. While relatively few users use this option, it is rising in popularity. and are the plus points of using a decentralized exchange. Security decentralization Custody of your tokens stays with you and trading of tokens from different chains is done via (For a complete beginner’s guide read this ) atomic swaps Forbes article What this means is that you are very unlikely to lose your funds from hacks as it stays in your custody. Furthermore, KYC is not needed when trading on decentralized exchanges! However, when trading on a decentralized exchange for a couple of reasons. For example, the user interface is not as intuitive as compared to centralized exchanges in general. liquidity is a major pain point Moreover, market making is difficult to carry out, although some decentralized exchanges have used trading APIs to tackle this issue. In Conclusion Choosing the best method to trade altcoins is as important as choosing the right altcoin to trade. If not considered properly it may cost a substantial amount in terms of transaction fees as well as the loss of your funds in some cases. In an ideal situation, we can find a trading method that is secure, low cost and has high volumes of liquidity. Unfortunately, that does not exist right now. Decentralized exchanges are catching up on liquidity and centralized exchanges are continuously improving on their security measures. In the meantime, understanding the trade-offs between each method will ensure you choose a trading strategy best suited to you. Connect With Me Email: jiayung@blockconstellation.com

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While there has been plenty of talk about the regulatory and privacy implications, there has been little public dialogue about the technology behind Facebook’s new digital currency. Can regulators concerns about privacy be alleviated upon closer inspection of Facebook’s new digital currency? Facebook’s cryptocurrency Libra uses LibraBFT, a Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus protocol. LIbraBFT is a derivative of another consensus protocol called HotStuff, which uses classical BFT algorithm Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance, pBFT. BFT systems are often comprised of nodes, delegates (who can approve the blocks), and a participant who proposes the next block. David Marcus, Head of Facebook’s cryptocurrency wallet, Calibra, tweeted that Libra has 3 distinct components, including its BFT-based permissioned, scalable blockchain. A permissioned blockchain means that node participants must be granted access to join the network. An access control layer built into the blockchain only allows known nodes to participate on the network. A node is a device on the blockchain network that is spread out across the network. Node operators contribute their computing resources to the network for the storage and validation of transactions. On some networks, nodes earn transaction fees. What do we know about PBFT? “PBFT is a classic consensus mechanism for distributed systems,” Da Hongfei, whose NEO project adopted delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dBFT) for its consensus algorithm, told HackerNoon. Most often, pBFT employs two rounds of peer-to-peer message exchanges to achieve this goal. When a leader broadcasts its proposed (legal) state transition to request to other nodes, as an honest node in the system, it first needs to know that enough nodes have also received this state transition request. It can confirm this request is valid. This confirms there is a about the state transition. consensus among enough nodes If the leader fails during protocol operation, nodes cannot communicate with it. The leader must then be replaced, resulting in a view change and the node broadcasting a view change request. When a node receives enough view change requests, a view change confirmation is sent to the new leader. The new view starts when the new leader receives a certain threshold of . view change confirmations In NEO, dBFT can counter unreliable or untrustworthy participants on the blockchain more effectively than other algorithms, according to proponents.  Facebook must have chosen its variation of dBFT in order to ensure that untrustworthy actors use its currency as a means of minimizing KYC and AML risks. BFT consensus protocols help to overcome the Byzantine Generals Problem, a condition of distributed computing systems where components may fail and there is imperfect information on whether a component has failed. This means that the holder of a NEO token holder can support a specific ‘bookkeeper’ through a vote. The selected group of bookkeepers then use the Byzantine Fault Tolerance mechanism to reach a consensus and generate more blocks. dBFT’s feature of absolute finality ensures that, after final confirmation, a block can’t be bifurcated, so the transaction can’t be rolled back. The dBFT consensus mechanism entails a voting process wherein token holders have the right to vote for delegates regardless of the amount of currency they hold. Voting in the NEO network happens in real-time. dBFT is a consensus algorithm developed with perfect finality, meaning that all transactions are final after the first confirmation. The blockchain cannot fork with dBFT, and is built with regulatory and business use cases in mind. According to , the voting system of dBFT allows large-scale participation. NEO Libra and NEO are using BFT consensus protocols. Ontology uses vBFT consensus protocol, as well, which combines verifiable random functions (VRF) and BFT. not the only blockchain projects

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Electricity is, for the most part, a worldwide utility easily reachable by consumers. But when it comes to the energy industry as a whole, conditions sway into strict regulation, monopolies, or even total chaos. Producing electricity itself is only half the story - making use of existing grids, matching supply and demand, and reducing greenhouse emissions while producing it is a complex task. The energy industry is key to bringing growth and stability to a community. As much as 2.8 billion people lack access to electricity or have only partial access, according to from the International Energy Agency (IEA). The markets with limited or no access to electricity are concentrated in three main regions - South America, the Indian subcontinent, and Africa. data Source: researchgate.net While the number of people without electricity is concerning, it seems to be decreasing rapidly. In the past two decades, hundreds of millions of people received easier access to electricity. This trend also coincides with the growth of electricity from renewable sources, which face specific challenges in joining the grid and establishing records and market prices. The IEA also that renewable energy will grow in importance: predicts “Renewables will have the fastest growth in the electricity sector, providing almost 30% of power demand in 2023, up from 24% in 2017. During this period, renewables are forecast to meet more than 70% of global electricity generation growth, led by solar PV and followed by wind, hydropower, and bioenergy.” Just like other developments in the energy market, changes are mostly locked within the borders of nation-states, especially where favorable rules and regulations facilitate a renewable energy market. are largely unpredictable energy sources. For this reason, the process of integrating renewables into the grid is rather data-intensive, posing both a challenge and an opportunity to discover innovative solutions for accounting, recording, predicting, and seamlessly joining in renewables for a more eco-friendly energy mix. Renewables Anyway, we shouldn’t overlook regional exceptions with a well-established share of the energy mix in South America and pockets of successful renewable energy integration in Africa, one of the growing markets for alternative energy sources. But it doesn’t come without its own problems - there are regions within Africa where renewables are easily accessible but it is extremely difficult to raise the investment required to build the infrastructure and put the technology in place. How can blockchain help? As discussed above, producing electricity, matching supply and demand, as well as creating some predictability is key to bringing reliable electric power to a wider population. Some form of data-based solution is inevitable in distributing electricity and creating a secondary market for grid inclusion. Luckily, there is already a keen interest in discovering those solutions. A recent report by reveals some of the challenges and opportunities in consolidating distributed energy production through a blockchain-based approach. Ernst & Young In the most common instance, as the grid adds more small-scale renewable sources, the data for buying and selling will increase exponentially. On the smallest scale, the task of sifting through data would include cases where a single household buys or sells photovoltaic electricity from another household. Since photovoltaics are a growth sector, Ernst & Young predicts that the data administration of electricity costs may soon exceed the cost of electricity itself, making a solution rather urgent. Source: iea.org Those exchanges will need a reliable record and fast accounting, taking up millions of instances. “As these tipping points approach, challenges will increase and revenues will be stretched. Empowered prosumers will require flexible monitoring and control systems that are relevant to their individual levels of engagement. Transaction complexities and risks will rise as the number of participants in the distributed energy systems increases,” states Ernst & Young. The first use of blockchain to solve these issues lies in its capabilities for record-keeping, peer-to-peer connections, and the generation of tokens. Using blockchain, the record of energy exchange can be immediate, using the unique keys of the grid participants. A payment event can also happen immediately, and the record of the transaction can be locked into an immutable block. In regard to blockchain interaction and payment, events can happen at almost the same time, saving the need to match data. Each transaction will be unforgeable due to the fact that the use of complex encryption that removes the need to trust a regulator or a human entity. Each transaction will be traceable and searchable, as blockchains are not entirely anonymous and can be de-anonymized for the sake of energy tracking. In theory, the connections within a blockchain-powered network will map the actual grid and the connections between producers and consumers - or “prosumers” as they have been called, since they are on both sides of the energy equation. Projects harnessing blockchain for electricity markets Since blockchains have mechanisms to avoid double-counting energy and can trigger automatic events in order to maintain the pace of the energy grid, projects have already started exploring solutions. One of those projects, ,  has the explicit mission to create connections between consumers to buy and sell electricity. Their project facilitates a marketplace but also pushes toward additional investment in photovoltaics. Through the practice of asset tokenization, Power Ledger allows for the partial purchase of renewable source assets - thus, allowing anyone to participate directly in the purchase and installation of more green-energy households. This improves the energy mix and also brings electricity to previously unreachable areas. Power Ledger offers a similar approach by stressing the importance of directly accessing green energy markets. Depending on the country, green energy may be added to the general mix, commanding state-established prices. Platforms manage to offer more efficient pricing and a direct link to green energy. WePower offers on-chain immediate accounting, as well as an auction mechanism to create a more efficient price discovery. WePower also presents Power Purchase Agreements, which are simpler automatic contracts. This would allow small businesses or households to achieve better electricity pricing, without the need for complex contracts with power suppliers. WePower is yet another blockchain grid coordinator for the US market, specializing in small-scale lots, potentially connecting domestic producers to place their surplus at competitive prices. Gridplus Source: xkcd.com The practice of trading electricity is well-established in developed countries. In the United Kingdom, as much as 30 alternative energy companies are already selling electricity, and offer sales contracts employing conventional mixes of power generation, 100% renewables, or cocktails of both. Anyway, it’s not as easy as taking a solution from a well-established market and use it for emerging markets like Africa. While for many markets, there is already a trading infrastructure in place that works well enough, simply adding the blockchain to it can be seen as just a gimmick that doesn’t solve the underlying problem of efficiency. A purely utility token will do little to help build actual production in places where there is none. However, blockchain can very well be used to issue a security token through which the company ensures there will be investment, returns, and efficiency, in fostering the development of new power generation. Blockchain security tokens will be very effective to provide the finance to harness mixtures of fuels and technologies (including renewables) tailored to societal needs for electricity in individual developing markets. Minimizing greenhouse emissions Each blockchain project has a specialized profile when it comes to energy. The typical sources of green energy are from wind turbines and photovoltaics as you can see in projects like or . Hydropower plants have been matched up with blockchain in the project. And even waste productions are exploited by . SunExchange SolarCoin Iberdrola TerraGreen One project is different from all these solutions: . First, the company has a real-life business with generation based on utilizing “flared”, or wasted natural gas, on floating power plants. Secondly, it uses a security token to allow individual investors to participate directly into their business. Gigajoule Renewable electricity generation is mostly variable and cannot be relied upon to provide power at all times. The power generation solution offered by Gigajoule is particularly well-suited as a back-up to, and to be integrated with, renewable power, being able to generate electricity at any time, on-demand, and to start up at short notice. The power plant design they are proposing is based on high-efficiency technology, using natural gas which would otherwise be wasted, and can maintain high efficiency (and therefore low greenhouse emissions) over wide ranges of the load. Gigajoule can thus very well follow load variations from renewables. Unlike the blockchain projects that only aim to issue a token and rely on third-party energy producers, Gigajoule works practically to provide cheap energy and decrease greenhouse gases. The firm utilizes technologies from Rolls Royce and Siemens to utilize the most efficient and modern gas turbines and engines, on top of which smart hardware is carefully tracking production. Gigajoule’s primary market is Nigeria. As mentioned earlier, Africa is a market with the potential for a varied, green energy mix. The company brings gas-based production to the mix. Nigeria was selected as the primary market due to its growing population, as well as an abundance of natural gas, which is, however, burnt wastefully and underutilized. At the same time, the country promises to be the largest economy in Africa, generating massive amounts of power to meet the demand for the coming decades. A project like Gigajoule would help Nigeria through its creeping through educational and employment programs for those in need. unemployment crisis For that reason, Gigajoule has decided to use a blockchain-secured asset - a security token that will aim to raise the funds for sustained future development. Through the token sale, the company is inviting much-needed private investment to Africa. A security token is much more than a digital asset for accounting. It’s a powerful tool to raise international capital, where internal funding is lacking. A security token is also attractive for offering a share of the project’s earnings. In the case of Gigajoule, the returns could reach 15% on an annualized basis. Thus, it has harnessed the blockchain in the most efficient way, building a crypto-protected security token in order to develop an entire electricity generating system, from funding to the actual hardware and execution, as well as long term operation and maintenance. From an investor's standpoint, the Gigajoule security token (GIGJ) can translate in long term and consistent returns when the first power is produced and the first profits are realised. The business already completed five years of research and bankable study work to confirm the technical and economic viability of their projects. The research so far was made for the first three projects in Nigeria which concluded that, with the projected annual power generation of 3,8 billion kWh and within the tariff framework federally prescribed, the annual sales could reach $360 million per project. Counting out the annual variable and fixed costs based upon the latest commercial prices for natural gas, amortisation of the capital cost, and depreciation, leaves them with an annual pre-tax profit of $74 million. Out of which GIGJ token holders can expect to share in distributable income around $10 million over 20 years for each developed project. Based on these calculations, for the long term goal, the expected returns for the investors should be multiplied by three plus the additional projects that will be implemented in other African countries, SE Asia, South America, and many of the first world countries where the lack of electricity producers is an issue. Gigajoule has the intention to add a new project each year, continuously growing the profit return for the investment up to $34.67 for each dollar invested after 30 years and 10 successful projects implemented. As it does indeed sound promising, Gigajoule’s task of building offshore gas turbine platforms will take time – power generating equipment can take 18 months to manufacture and Gigajoule may, therefore, need approaching two years for their power plants to enter service and earn revenue. Source: heritage.org Africa shows great potential in harnessing its renewable or surplus energy. However, due to the fragmentation of the market, large-scale investment is uneven. Government spending is also limited, leading to the need for startups and entrepreneurs to invest in some of the more promising economies. Regions that offer a robust or growing share of renewables and green energy are extending an invitation to startups to improve the efficiency of their valuable resources. : (Disclaimer The author is not associated with any of the projects mentioned.)

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Can Blockchain Bring Electricity to 2 Billion People off the Grid?

Be honest… how many hours have you spent trying to conquer a digital castle on your phone, collect that gold skin for your avatar, or get your hero to their max level? We all do it, we all chase that next goal in our games, but what if the odds were never actually in our favor? Games as we know them are almost always based on chance. In the digital world that refers to either a randomly generated number or a preset factor set by the developers. The former is great, if you can prove it, but the latter is where frustration and the feeling of a neverending grind come in. Sure, there are mini milestones on the way to major gaming achievements but they never seem to satisfy quite enough. Wouldn’t it be better if you knew, without a doubt, that the games you were playing were fair? Fair ≠ easy Games that are easy offer no challenge and thus, . If there was an “ ” button attached to every game people would probably stop playing it pretty quickly, but the flipside is also true. If people knew that the lofty goal (that special set of armor, that rare card, etc.) was actually they may even stop playing - no one wants to work toward a goal that is impossible. But if it could be proven without a doubt that the special prize you were seeking were actually possible, albeit very difficult to attain, that only makes it all . This is where cryptocurrency games come into play. no feeling of accomplishment instant win statistically unattainable the more desirable Source: xkcd.com Cryptocurrency games differ from other online games because they offer a few unique perks: a guaranteed statistical edge, immutability, and provable fairness. With these three key characteristics many variations of cryptocurrency games can be built, and so long as they abide by those three important characteristics they will offer a more balanced playing field for their users compared to traditional online games. In a standard online game there is no traceable record to show what you should have received from your loot box versus what you actually received, so although the loot box may claim a “25% chance to unlock X achievement” you might open 100 of them and never receive it. Sure, bad luck may have been in play, but without anyway to verify it you have to admit you may have just been robbed. Games that exist on a blockchain automatically remove this problem thanks to immutability, and since these games are run on smart contracts anyone can verify that everything is as it should be. In addition to this, these games allow you to truly own that special goal you’ve worked so hard for; it’s yours and no one can take it from you. Popular crypto games in the past have included and , both taking the same principles and building upon them. Cryptokitties started the breeding-style game craze, and Etherbots added digital robots to it. Now games like are taking the genre a step further by offering more things to do in the game, more strategy involved in winning, and more variety when it comes to collectibles. Since CoinDogs is the most extensive of these three, let’s look at the nitty gritty of their systems and programming to further investigate the perks of cryptocurrency games. Etherbots Cryptokitties CoinDogs Playing against players The main perks of playing a game like CoinDogs versus other online games are that you are competing against players (not the company) and you can actually earn money back instead of just spending it, but more on that later. The fact that players are playing against other players and not a company automatically means that at least someone (and not something) is winning every time. Let’s look at the main gaming experience in CoinDogs - racing. This is far more complex in terms of algorithmic complexity compared to other crypto games like Etherbots or Cryptokitties. In CoinDogs the better dog wins, but how the better dog is calculated (not chosen) depends on 15+ factors: On top of that there are external factors that come into play when determining how dogs perform in the race, like the current real-world lunar cycle. All of these factors come together to create a simulation of the dog’s performance, and from this simulation the winner is determined. The winner is never just “picked”, thus making the game much more fair. The same is true for games like Cryptokitties and Etherbots where you are only competing against other players in regard to collecting the best combinations, and all of the probability is entirely verifiable on a blockchain. Etherbots’ battle function is a glorified rock-paper-scissor situation, but since the selected movelists from the various players are stored on the blockchain they are immutable and thus, everyone can double check that everything was fair after the battle. CoinDogs doesn’t have these functionalities implemented on a blockchain and maybe that’s for the best because it has a lot more variables and managing all of them onchain is far from easy. Simplicity in statistics Cryptocurrency games offer 100% repeatable results, which is the true strength of these types of games. There is no RNG in gameplay. In CoinDogs, if a race was replicated 100 times with the same dogs the results would always be the same. In Etherbots everyone can check the move lists after the battles are done, and in Cryptokitties the statistical probability of breeding certain kitties is immutable and transparent. The challenge in these games comes from understanding them. In CoinDogs, you are not only calculating your own dog’s possible racing skills, but understanding that when you enter into a race you don’t know the factors of the dogs you are competing against. Sure, your dog might have a lot of great factors working toward its success, but the other dogs might have even better legs and be more in favor with the current lunar cycle. In cryptocurrency games, beating other players is your only focus (as it should be in any other game). The company has no actual involvement in the race. CoinDogs doesn’t even take a fee for facilitating the race; the only cost is the amount you want to invest in your dog during the race. If your dog takes first place, your get 3x their investment back, second place will receive 2.5x back, while third will net 1.5x back to you. The bottom four dogs in the race lose their investment, which can be especially frustrating when you have a really fast dog but everyone else's was faster. But given the fact that 42% of participants win each race, your time to win will come soon enough. Conclusion Cryptocurrency games are more fair than their traditional online counterparts, but they still have their costs and strategies. While a free, traditional online game may have microtransactions that gradually eat away at your bank account, cryptocurrency games come with a minimal startup cost: buying your first kittie, dog, or robot. The overall cost of the two different types of games depends on the player and their skill level, of course, but one factor that doesn’t vary is the overall fairness of the gaming experience. Source: dilbert.com No matter what types of games you enjoy, be sure to look for their cryptocurrency/blockchain-based alternatives, you won’t regret shifting your gaming experience to the decentralized world. The author is not associated with any of the projects mentioned.

HackerNoon Tech Stories Archive September 16th, 2019

@worm4047Abhishek Chaudhary

@polluterofmindsJustin Hunter

@elan-srinivasanElankumaran Srinivasan

@elan-srinivasanElankumaran Srinivasan

@kharekartikKartik Khare

@FrederikBusslerFrederik Bussler

@Scrum.orgScrum.org

@alex.circeiAlex Circei

@DavidDavid Smooke

@chgdCharlie G.

@jack-prabhaJack Prabha

@DavidDavid Smooke

@ProgRockRecShawn Gordon

@josef.tetekKryptoJoseph

@techlooterAndrej Kovacevic

@raghunathRaghunath Reddy

@sjors-van-dongenSjors van Dongen

@techlooterAndrej Kovacevic

@ntnsndrNathan Schneider

@avcourtAndrew Vaillancourt

@nathanNathan Beckord

@rossimarcoMarco Rossi

@jia-yungJia Yung

@no profileprofileremoved

@noprofilenoprofile

@noprofilenoprofile

@worm4047
Abhishek Chaudhary

@polluterofminds
Justin Hunter

@elan-srinivasan
Elankumaran Srinivasan

@elan-srinivasan
Elankumaran Srinivasan

@kharekartik
Kartik Khare

@FrederikBussler
Frederik Bussler

@Scrum.org
Scrum.org

@alex.circei
Alex Circei

@David
David Smooke

@chgd
Charlie G.

@jack-prabha
Jack Prabha

@David
David Smooke

@ProgRockRec
Shawn Gordon

@josef.tetek
KryptoJoseph

@techlooter
Andrej Kovacevic

@raghunath
Raghunath Reddy

@sjors-van-dongen
Sjors van Dongen

@techlooter
Andrej Kovacevic

@ntnsndr
Nathan Schneider

@avcourt
Andrew Vaillancourt

@nathan
Nathan Beckord

@rossimarco
Marco Rossi

@jia-yung
Jia Yung

@no profile
profileremoved

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@noprofile
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