Field Dayis in the Nonprofit Tech Industry

Field Day

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2024 is touted as the “The Ultimate Election Year” by Time magazine and rightfully so as more than 50 countries prepare for national elections, roughly more than half the population of the planet. Some of the largest democracies up for elections from the stated list are India, the US, Mexico, Indonesia, and more, making 2024 a turning point in the geopolitical landscape for democracy. Media is the fourth pillar of with the responsibility of upholding the truth to the public, but a closer look at the current scenario would show you a different perspective. There is no one sinister plot at play, it is a series of unfortunate events catalyzed by well intentioned citizens misplacing their enthusiasm to further the misinformation chaos. democracy Systematic erosion of democracy may now be a field day with the advent of AI, specifically massification of it through Generative AI Systematic erosion of democracy may now be a field day with the advent of AI, specifically massification of it through . For instance, , an organization that tracks misinformation, just since May 2023, websites hosting AI-created false articles have increased by more than 1,000%, ballooning from 49 sites to more than 600. Propaganda operations that were usually menial tasks performed by underpaid cyber armies are now easily enabled by AI that is strikingly similar to official news. The lines of real and fake are easily blurred, even for the well informed and well read consumers and this freefall of misinformation may lead us soon to question the nature of news altogether. Generative AI according to NewsGuard In Here, Lies the Opportunity If AI is the poison that contaminates the well of information, it is also the said antidote, or at least a key ingredient. The technology can also be deployed to detect misinformation and text generated by AI and also launching counter to contain the spread of misinformation. campaigns Even tech companies are huddling to create proactive solutions to mitigate the risks. Industry leaders, including OpenAI, Microsoft, TikTok, X, Meta, Amazon, and Google, disclosed a new agreement, ‘ ’, that aims to minimize the risk of AI interfering in the 2024 US elections. They have pledged a series of commitments that include developing new technologies to mitigate risks, detecting distribution on their platforms, more transparency and launching public awareness campaigns on media literacy. Tech Accord to Combat Deceptive Use of AI in 2024 Elections However, this is mostly focused on the US elections, and as important as they may be, media literacy is a much bigger issue in the developing countries. An independent alternative powered by the honchos of the media industry could be a viable solution. It is an opportunity in disguise where the whole industry can unite to fight this deviant and also create a wholesome database of accurate news links. This also creates an easy access for the user to consume news of their preferred news networks while comparing the headlines. If not through an industry initiative, but with help of veteran experts this is an achievable task. An unimpeachable mecca of news, the ultimate utopia or rather resetting to the original DD news in India or PBS in US days, no nonsense shows, just news. In fact, the silent period rule in large scale democracies like ours, could be even extended from 48 hours to 6 months as public perception is moulded constantly with accessibility of news on their phones and these laws predate the notification technology. When it comes to AI, this is still a manageable expectation, for instance Midjourney’s CEO, David Holz was considering banning creation of political (in context of the US elections) images for 2024. If there are guardrails installed on the creation process by AI companies, it is a beast that can be possibly tamed. This article was originally published by on Sanjay Sehgal The Tech Panda.

The Influence of AI on Voter Decision-Making: A Global Democracy’s Crossroads

Let's learn about via these 46 free stories. They are ordered by most time reading created on HackerNoon. Visit the to find the most read stories about any technology. Product Launch /Learn Repo 1. OpenBB Terminal 2.0 is More Than an Alternative for Bloomberg Terminal OpenBB Terminal 2.0 is more than an application, it’s a platform. 2. Why is a Product Owner Needed (PO)? This article explains the day-to-day responsibilities and the skills required to be a successful Product Owner in a SaaS tech company. 3. What Makes a Successful Product Launch: 6 Lessons for First Time Founders Launch is neither the beginning nor the end. It is a series of overlapping sequences. A typical one may include pre-build, pre-launch, launch, and post-launch. 4. Introducing ApiHome: Home of API Testing OpenAPI based API Testing Tool 5. The First Week of YourStack 2,281 days ago Product Hunt launched as a tiny newsletter. The early days were especially chaotic. I didn’t get much sleep, skipped the gym, and buried my head into work. While unsustainable (I'm not advocating overworking yourself!), it was sooo fun and energizing to build something brand new. It was also scary. New products – especially those driven by community – are incredibly fragile. 7 days ago we launched a beta of YourStack (with a grammatically incorrect, non-editable tweet – lol). Instantly those same nostalgic feelings from the early days of Product Hunt re-emerged. The response has been very encouraging. Alex was kind enough to write about it on BuzzFeed. Lucas followed with a story on TechCrunch. And a bunch of folks shared support on Twitter and Product Hunt. But the product is very early and our roadmap is deep. So far we've onboarded only ~4% of those that have signed up as we build tooling to scale (thanks for all your patience!). I wake up each morning nervous but excited to read your feedback and wild ideas as the team and I continue building. If you get a chance, create your account and start stacking. We're whitelisting new friendly folks each day. Feedback? I'd love to hear it at ryan@yourstack.com. Cheers,
Ryan Hoover (@rrhoover) 6. How to Print Your Tweets onto Tshirts Tech Startup Allows Customers to Easily Print Any Tweet on a T-Shirt 7. I Launched on New Year's Eve and This is What I've Learned Three months ago in the Bay Area, I was working on another project, had an ex-Google tech co-founder, and a chat bot nobody cared about. 8. A Complete Guide To SKU Management For Retailers SKU management is the process of creating, organizing, and perfecting an alphanumeric SKU system for the items in your inventory. SKUs give inventory details. 9. How To Start an App Business in 8 Simple Steps Starting an app startup can be overwhelming. Here's how to go all the way from ideation to marketing in 8 (relatively) easy steps. 10. How to Bridge the Developer Experience Gap with raise.dev I founded Raise.dev to help every developer advance their career. 11. Bye Bye Google: How I Botched My Company's Launch After Leaving I like to analyze my past work through the prism of evaluating my mistakes (I’m sure my therapist would have a field day with that one). I launched my first publicly available engineering project in early December and as George W. Bush once said, “Mistakes were made”. 12. How to Get Over 1000 Beta Testers for Your SaaS App in 1 Week A couple of weeks ago, we released our new SaaS app MagicFlow (2K+ MRR) to the public after a 1.5 months beta period. 13. I Built a Tool to Help You Sketch Out an MVP Proposal in Minutes How would you go from an idea to a potential product? 14. Wikipedia Sucks: There's a Solution by Wiki’s Real Daddy Dr. Sanger, a respected internet visionary highlights Wiki’s shocking deterioration and provides a solution for the monster that has become Wikipedia. 15. How I Got 78 Criticisms on Show Hacker News for My Zoom Competitor Last month, I launched the app on Show HN. As a result, it got 82 points and 78 comments. Ranked in the toppest 10 of popular posts in a day also. Actually, we have pros and cons about it and people tend to criticize it more. Anyway, it felt so amazing that a lot of the people across the world visited my website and said hi to me. What an exciting moment! Today, I’d like to share how to develop and launch a landing page. 16. 5 Tips For Launching a Successful Product Many new products get launched in the market every day. But not every product is a hit. 17. The Archethic Mainnet Has Officially Been Launched "Fully decentralized, open-source public blockchain with high speed and low transaction fees made by the people, for the people" 18. Tech News Playlist: Nigerian Founder is Back, Retail Startup Wins Ignite 2022 Today’s news includes the foundation of Venture Studio, the 2022 Startup World Cup, as well as the latest on aerospace, cybersecurity, and crypto. 19. How Slack's Huddles Gave Us The Boost We Needed To Launch Remote working makes it hard to have the spontaneity that offices can bring. Slack Huddles managed to bring that to one team's successful bid for ProductHunt 20. Just Launched ConnectDome to Solve Networking for Developers Interacting to exchange info and develop professional or social contacts can be tricky. Check out the newly launched ConnectDome for a potential solution. 21. Compare Twitter Social Graphs with Vennly Search Vennly to see the intersection of any 2 Twitter social graphs. 22. Every GTM Should Be A Phased Launch and Here's Why The “big splash” rollout is often a big mistake. Methodical phased launches lead to higher success rates and lower churn rates 23. How I Got To #1 on Product Hunt as a Nobody I am a nobody on the internet; not an influencer, not a VC, and not a serial entrepreneur. I only had about 100 followers on Twitter prior to launching. But my product, One Profile, was recently awarded #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt (PH) and that has changed my life. 24. I Outsourced Label Manufacturing To Jump Start My eCommerce Business Private label manufacturers can be a game-changer for any e-commerce business.  We're discussing how they help and how to work with them. 25. Why Do Product Managers and Product Designers Need Each Other? Teammates, not opponents. That’s how product managers and product designers are expected to work in product teams. 26. I Took Ownership of a Major Product Feature as a PM Intern This post will cover Denis’ workflow from planning to execution around the Preferences project as well as his experience working with the Courier team. 27. 7 Benefits of MVP for Startups In this article, we are considering key peculiarities and benefits of a minimum viable product that will help you enter the market more successfully. 28. Efficient Deployment and Release Management “Do not deploy on Friday” is not a joke after all even if you have continuous deployment. With deciding to deploy anyway comes the subtle concern... 29. How We Made a Slack App in 11 Days Hey, everyone! We, the Indie Hackers SPB Community, organized a one-week Bootcamp: in our free time, we built a product from scratch and launched it on Product Hunt. We got the #3 Product of the Day badge and over 30 installs of our app in the Slack Workspaces. Now, I want to share our experience. At the end of this article, I will share our Notion checklist, that we found extremely helpful for the launch preparation :) 30. Convert PDF Document in Three Steps using DynamicDocs API Advicement newly launched DynamicDocs API gives businesses the ability to automatically generate PDF documents with dynamic text, tables and charts. 31. How to Launch a Product Successfully The phone balanced high-end quality with a mid-range price tag, offering a top of the range smartphone on the level of a flagship Samsung Galaxy for half the price. When word got out — through social media and tech sites who marvelled at the quality to price ratio — consumer interest spiked. 32. Kempus is What Facebook was Intended to Be An interview with a CEO you're about to hear a lot about. 33. SPARQ Launches on App Store and Google Play After months of validating the concept and testing the app, SPARQ’s time has finally come! 34. Chase Bowers Got His First Thousand Customers Without Spending Any Money - Here's How! How Did Chase Bowers Get 1,000+ New Customers Without Spending a Dime? He gave away 1,000 free plans, used feedback to improve, & then launched paid plans. 35. Don't Make These Common Mistakes When Launching Your Website On October 22 I've launched online my first website. I'd like to share with you my experience. 36. How To Sustain Your Business In The Post-Pandemic World I decided to cover today the concept of how to push your business in the post-pandemic world since I think it is more than ever a tragic and unprecedented situation that we are in today. 37. 4 Creative Ways to Generate Buzz for Your Product Launch Are you having trouble generating buzz around your new product launch? Check out our guide on how to generate buzz for your new product launch. 38. Looking for a New Smartphone Led Me to Create a Platform That Aims to Reverse the Product-Market Fit We have hundreds of brands producing the same things and no one catering for any other needs, be it in terms of size, keyboard, or other characteristics. 39. How to get featured on Product Hunt Everyone dreams of making it to the front page of Product Hunt. It’s a chance to show off your creation to thousands of tech enthusiasts. 40. Gradual Code Releases: An In-House Kubernetes Canary Controller Our short-term strategy involved developing an in-house Canary deployment process powered by a custom Kubernetes controller. 41. Hacking Your Product Hunt Launch [A How-To Guide] If you still don’t know what Product Hunt is and why you should do your launch on this platform, I suggest you read this article, this is the official Product Hunt post, a must read. 42. Scoping Out The Elements Involved In Effective Product Management Product management has seen a lot of takers in the last few years. This field is so varied and versatile that putting bounds to it is a daunting task. Nevertheless, based on my experience and knowledge gained from the circles of product community; I have listed down different fundamental elements of product management. 43. An Overview of our PH Launch for AskMakers v2.0 Oh…I am so sleepy…because I launched AskMakers 2.0 on Product Hunt and I have been monitoring it almost without sleeping😪 44. How to Get Featured on Product Hunt Without a Hunter How to launch on Product Hunt and get to the top-5 products of the day? I share fresh tips and heads-up based on successful and failed 2021 ProductHunt launches 45. 🚀 Ultimate Startup Launch Checklist: 2020 Edition 🚀 Over the past few years, I've had the great chance to help some awesome SaaS startups with their digital marketing. 46. Minimize Risk When Launching Digital Products And Make Passive Income Launching a new digital product is risky... unless you're following this zero-risk validation model Thank you for checking out the 46 most read stories about Product Launch on HackerNoon. to find the most read stories about any technology. Visit the /Learn Repo

46 Stories To Learn About Product Launch

The introduction of blockchain technology brought a novel way to conduct financial transactions. Absolutely trustless, Bitcoin and other removed the need for users to rely on trusted third parties to send and receive money. However, that is limited to peer-to-peer transactions. decentralized digital assets Centralized institutions, like the ones in traditional finance, mushroomed to offer utility and convenience that otherwise don’t exist with self-custody and peer-to-peer transacting. Today, the Web3 industry comprises several centralized entities operating alongside decentralized implementations to provide users with a burgeoning ecosystem of finance and tokenized use cases. However, that poses critical challenges. The Woes of the Web3 Ecosystem Trusting institutions to hold and transact user value can lead to bad behavior propelled by the selfish motives of those operating said institutions. Due to that, many – institutional and retail – have their assets stolen. Look no further than the to know how things can go very wrong. Web3 users FTX fiasco The story does not change with any other centralized enterprise that looted its customers. Money-hungry founders adopt corrupt governance practices to part clients from their assets. The growing adoption of the asset type creates a massive need for honest governance practices. Decentralized Web3 protocols also face their own threats, with hackers looking to exploit the large amounts of liquidity they manage. Many protocols have fallen victim to cybercriminals attacking their storages and transactions to walk away with tremendous value. Regardless, the issues faced by centralized and decentralized Web3 platforms are beatable. And what is better than using technology to combat the issues faced by technological advancements that are blockchain and digital assets? Multi-Party Computation (MPC) technology has become the answer to governance-related issues in the centralized and decentralized parts of the Web3 ecosystem. As MPC-based wallets get integrated into the asset storage infrastructures of centralized and decentralized platforms, the ecosystem is moving towards secure, efficient, and simplified institutional governance. The Governance Dilemma in Web3 The governance problems faced by digital asset institutions are nothing new. In fact, the issue of institutions and enterprises behaving poorly with user assets has remained a recurring theme throughout the existence of digital assets. Not using appropriate storage infrastructure, misappropriating funds for self-serving gains, and scamming clients outright have all been repetitive occurrences in the ecosystem. Poor governance in relation to asset storage and access has been why enterprises lose client assets to hackers or decide to steal the value themselves. Web3 protocols operating on decentralized models face governance-related issues as well. The wallets they use for storing and transacting assets and interacting with their user bases are vulnerable to internal and external threats. Like the large amounts of assets stored by institutions, protocol-related wallets attract bad actors in droves. The holes in asset transactions and storage security can allow hackers to have a field day and steal in the millions. If not obvious, such occurrences are related to how the protocols and institutions manage the assets. Relying on traditional single-signature wallets and even multi-signature (multisig) wallets is neither the safest nor the most efficient way to handle them. Single-signature wallets pose the . Essentially, hackers can access the funds stored in a single-signature wallet if they retrieve their private keys. issue of a single point of failure Despite using cold wallets that store private keys offline securely, over the more vulnerable online hot wallets, the threats posed by social engineering and phishing constantly loom. Bad actors can take advantage of the redundancies present with using cold wallets in the enterprise setting to penetrate through their high-level security. Then, there is always the issue of rogue players within the enterprises, taking advantage of the single point of failure possessed by single-signature wallets. How hard is it for an employee or anyone from the top-level management to misappropriate funds from their company’s wallets? All it takes is access to wallet private keys and the motivation to steal. While the most logical approach to evading such issues is using multisig wallets, they are not without their drawbacks. Multisig wallets require multiple keys in an m-of-n configuration to sign a transaction. That means multiple signatures get broadcasted on-chain, and when the required number of signatures are broadcasted, transactions get initiated from the . However, that poses security vulnerabilities. multisig setup Hackers who have narrowed down on protocol- or institution-related wallets can figure out the wallets signing the transaction and the number of keys required to sign any transaction. Over a long enough period, they can theoretically gain access to the needed number of wallet private keys to launch successful attacks. Similarly, corrupt organizational members can retrieve the private key information of their peers to take control of funds and manipulate transactions. Also, several key signing transactions increase transaction fees at the blockchain level. Furthermore, multisig wallets are not interoperable and often just support one chain. So, interacting with assets from different blockchains will require enterprises and projects to utilize multiple multisig setups. Keeping track of all those wallets and spending heavily on the numerous transactional requirements are not feasible. Single- and multi-signature wallets may be ideal for the average retail investor or user. But institutions need wallet solutions that are more secure and efficient without one canceling the other, which is usually a dilemma with anything blockchain-related. Introducing MPC Technology: A Paradigm Shift in Governance MPC technology is nothing new – it has been a staple of cryptography since the ‘80s. With developments in MPC technology and blockchain’s introduction, MPC has integrated into the functioning of digital asset wallets. MPC technology is used to create separate shards of data. These shards, when combined, can compute a specific result. During the computation, no information about any shard is revealed. MPC algorithms are designed to hide the sharded data of users from one another while revealing just the results of computations. Transposing this capability to digital asset wallet functionalities generates possibilities where multiple individuals, again m-of-n, can approve transactions. It might sound like how multisig wallets work, but several differences exist. The major one is MPC wallets not consisting of several private keys like multisig wallets. Instead, they work with one key divided into multiple shards. When all the key shards, or the needed number of shards, initiate a transaction, the algorithm computes the data from the shards to generate a transaction signature. This signature then takes the transaction on-chain for verification. The computation itself is executed off-chain. Thus, hackers cannot learn about the key shards responsible for initiating transactions from MPC wallets by looking at blockchain explorers. This security comes on top of that offered by the multiple key shards needed to initiate transactions. MPC wallets are, thus, highly resilient against cyberattacks. Several MPC wallet providers now also implement key refresh features, which allow MPC wallet users to generate new key shards after every transaction or set intervals. Therefore, it is nearly impossible for cybercriminals to gather information about the needed shards over a long period to make unauthorized transactions. Institutions and protocols relying on MPC wallets for asset storage can avoid cyberattacks better than with other wallet types. Attacks launched by internal threats are obviously also averted. , reigning in the ideal governance measures through distributed access to digital assets in the most secure way. MPC wallets prevent the possibility of initiating corrupt transactions MPC wallets also offer high levels of transparency to enterprises. Those in charge of enterprise storage have access to wallet transaction history, including information about the value transferred and members approving or declining the transfers. Such improvements push MPC wallets above multisig ones despite both wallet types allowing for distributed digital asset transactions. MPC wallets also offer increased efficiency compared to multisig wallets and cold wallets. They transmit a single signature on-chain, making transaction confirmation much faster than confirmation on multisig wallets. Also, their enhanced security allows institution personnel to store the key shards safely online. Because of that, institutions can transact digital assets much faster than cold wallets while achieving similar levels of security. While cold wallets are still the industry standard for concentrated asset storage and can also come in MPC configurations, institutions can utilize hot wallets in MPC configurations for enhanced security while maintaining the efficiency needed to provide instant liquidity for customers. Another advantage of MPC wallets is that they are highly scalable. Say enterprises want to increase or decrease the number of personnel possessing access to their MPC wallets. They can generate or delete additional key shards with ease. Furthermore, MPC wallets are interoperable with most blockchains. So, enterprises and protocols can store several crypto assets in these wallets without maintaining dedicated wallets for each blockchain. The benefits do not stop there. MPC wallets can easily be plugged into platforms, removing the need to rebuild parts of the platforms to accommodate MPC storage. With a long list of advantages, MPC wallets are the logical choice over other wallets for platforms managing multiple wallets in their infrastructures and committing high-value transactions. Their efficiency and scalability are unmatched. MPC Technology in Action: Practical Applications for Institutional Governance MPC wallet providers are making a cutting-edge difference to the dilemma of institutional governance in Web3. Let’s look at some wallet providers and custodians providing the best MPC solutions. Fireblocks Fireblocks is an industry-leading custodian known to address all kinds of digital asset storage needs. Their non-custodial MPC wallet solution is one of the easiest to integrate into applications and platforms. It operates with the natively developed MPC-CMP algorithm – a leading innovation in MPC-based asset storage. The algorithm is open-source and can be audited before implementation. Fireblock’s MPC offerings are compatible with 50+ blockchains and hundreds, if not thousands, of tokens. Signing transactions occur with some of the fastest speeds while using Fireblock’s MPC wallets. These capabilities have let the custodian process transactions collectively, moving over $4 trillion. Liminal Custody Liminal is a fairly new entrant in the segment but is witnessing rapid adoption. Over fifty crypto enterprises use its services, including banking-grade MPC storage solutions. It also boasts more than $550 million worth of assets under secure storage and has processed transactions collectively worth over $6000 million through its custody solutions. Liminal has achieved such feats by making the most difference in the MPC wallet segment with its increased security protocols. digital asset custody That involves enterprises setting up measures like transaction limits and whitelisting receiver wallet addresses. These processes occur through ceremonies where enterprise personnel accept or decline wallets during the whitelisting process and set limits on transaction values. Through truly distributed governance, Liminal’s MPC wallets transform institutional governance and set the benchmark for Web3. Blockdaemon Blockdaemon – one of the best-known MPC wallet providers, has offered such solutions since 2018. Interestingly, the company is the first to issue MPC-based custody solutions. Not surprisingly, its MPC wallet solutions are some of the most widely used today. Several crypto enterprises and traditional finance institutions rely on its digital asset storage offerings. The wallet provider’s solutions come fortified by its “Advanced MPC” technology, a self-developed MPC module securing wallets on multiple levels. Like the other entrants here, Blockdaemon’s wallets are secured through distributed signing capabilities by dividing private keys into shards. However, what makes them highly interesting is the use of MPC technology for transaction-related policies. Blockdaemon uses cryptography to store policy-related information with key shards. Policies are, thus, merged with the key shards, making transaction manipulation highly unlikely. Therefore, transactions are secured by MPC technology at two layers, bringing increased security and good governance. These industry innovators offer solutions embedded with to take institutional, enterprise, and protocol custody-related governance to the next level. Despite the more touted benefits of distributed and secure access and storage of assets, MPC wallets bring other benefits like accountability and transparency to governance trails. So, whether it is an enterprise or a web3 protocol, permitted stakeholders always know how funds are accessed and utilized. MPC technology The Future of Institutional Governance with MPC Technology There is no doubt that MPC technology is spearheading the much-needed transformation in institutional governance that Web3 requires. By merging security, efficiency, and distributed access, MPC wallets avert major issues with the concentrated asset storage of enterprises and protocols. The entire ecosystem can rest easy now that their assets are stored much safer against cybercriminals and internal exploits. With that level of safety, more institutional investors will begin interacting with digital assets. The enormous value they pump into the ecosystem will remain secured by the enterprises of their choice. Of course, the safety will also extend to Web3 protocols. MPC wallets handling their massive liquidity will come set with predetermined parameters and distributed signing to ensure only correct transactions occur. DAOs will also move to implement MPC wallets if they are not already. All aspects of the will undoubtedly benefit from MPC technology. With calls for increased security, transparency, and efficient governance practices from user communities and regulators, MPC wallets hold the potential to fill all existing gaps. Web3 ecosystem Conclusion Web3 platforms have always had evident governance and security problems. They mainly stem from how the platforms store digital assets. MPC technology’s integration in asset storage infrastructure addresses the related governance issues and improves security and efficiency in handling large amounts of liquidity. Thus, it is important to understand how MPC technology plays a role in making the ecosystem better. Web3 enterprises must adapt to the changing times to meet the desires of users and lawmakers, and integrating MPC wallets into asset storage infrastructures will help them do that.

How MPC Technology is Simplifying Institutional Governance

Let's learn about via these 60 free stories. They are ordered by most time reading created on HackerNoon. Visit the to find the most read stories about any technology. Makers /Learn Repo 1. Open Source Series: Starting a Project or how to open your project to the world 2. Build Data-Driven Web App Without Backend During the last couple of decades websites' functionally has increased dramatically - from simple landing pages serving simple static ads to complex progressive web apps whose functionality close to native applications including user authorization, location tracking, bluetooth handling, and offline mode. 3. Complaint About BitMex’s WebSocket API, and Update On Profitable Market Makers 4. Open Source Ventilator Projects: Status, Challenges, How You Can Help At this moment, there are thousands of intelligent, diligent, well-meaning engineers trying to help the design of open source ventilators to address a possibly imminent life-threatening shortage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. This wealth of creative technical energy is currently disorganized, scattered, and unfocused. Rather than being a tremendous force for saving lives that it may become, energy and time is currently being wasted on oversimplifications of the problem and the belief that the projects are closer to deployable than they really are. 5. Bye Bye Google: How I Botched My Company's Launch After Leaving I like to analyze my past work through the prism of evaluating my mistakes (I’m sure my therapist would have a field day with that one). I launched my first publicly available engineering project in early December and as George W. Bush once said, “Mistakes were made”. 6. 3 Lessons That I Learned From my Failed Indie Hackers Project Earlier this year, I shamelessly ripped off an idea and built an app for making printable place cards thinking I too could generate some passive income. 7. Build an eCommerce Mobile App using Google Sheets, Stripe And Glide Last week, one of my Product2kit customers who bought a no-code template asked if I can create a template for eCommerce use cases. I took his idea and came up with this online sneaker store. Here’s my app building process: 8. How To Track All Your Side Projects in 1 Notion Template Note: This article is part of my toolkit newsletters↗️ where I share resources about building things. Join me :) 9. Top 3 Online Mentoring Platforms For Startups Stop passive learning and hack your growth with a mentor 10. Mozilla Summer Startup Studio and MVP Lab TLDR: See mozilla.org/builders for more details regarding our summer programs! 11. Our Secret Recipe for Product Hunt 👀 Hey Folks, we recently launched on Product Hunt and are proud to announce that we won Product of the Day! 12. The Best Way to Learn Arduino for Beginners Are you interested in Arduino, but don't know where to start? Here are 5 resources to help! 13. Finding Market Fit Modern startup advice is to launch and grow revenue as quickly as possible, as aggressively as possible. 14. How No Code ML Can Create an Impact on Businesses There’s a process for solving business problems via machine learning. If you Google “learn machine learning,” you’ll find a bunch of guides, online courses, and such that walk you through the coding languages of ML and the processes it takes to solve data predictions. You conclude it takes a lot of time to learn technical machine learning. 15. An insight into Asia's Tech Startup Scene With the boom in technology, tech startups are booming all over the world, especially in the Asian region. In recent years, it has been noticed that startups are growing the track record of success stories in the business world. 16. Top Management Tips for Startup Founders Here are some top dos and don'ts for startup founders, alongside some management tips for startup founders from successful entrepreneurs. 17. A Year in Review of My Developer-Focused SAAS This is the first annual review of Snipline. The shell command bookmarker app. [18. Building End-to-End Digital Onboarding Workflows Using Low-code](https://hackernoon.com/building-end-to-end-digital-onboarding-workflows-with-low-code-solution-2nak3y9x) On average, organizations admit they have identified around three major time wasters inside their companies: 19. Keeping People Focused by Distracting Them In developing my Chrome Extension Serenity, I believe I have hit the perfect balance between keeping users focused on their task while also distracting them with what your app has to offer. 20. Open Source Series: Intro or where the journey begins 21. How we built ToDoBot for Slack in 3 days Technically, it was four days, but we were working on it in between taking customer calls and fixing OneBar bugs so, let’s call it three ;) 22. Why You Should Always Build a MVP First Let’s take a look at a classic example of a situation that I have observed numerous times. An enthusiastic maker has an idea for a great product and starts building right away without checking for competitors, creating a landing page first or getting some feedback from potential users. The maker sits down in front of his computer and starts building his product blindly. 23. 5 Important Books For Indie Hackers: 2020 Edition In this post, I’ve listed five books that helped me to shape my mindset and that help with creating and marketing a viable product 24. My First Pitch to Investor: From Outsourcing to Product Hi community! My name is Sergii, I'm a CEO at WellSpeak from Kyiv Ukraine. We build a mobile app for practicing English speaking skills. 25. How We Iterated on 10 Ideas in a Month After a discussion (that lasted 30 seconds, as it was an obvious decision for us), we decided to share our complete journey with our new startup, Dataline, with as much transparency as possible. Learnings should be shared! Anybody can leverage our journey, and it’s also a good way for us to take a step back and understand what we did right and what we could improve upon. So here is our first story: how we iterated and sorted through 10 ideas in our first month of working on a new startup. 26. What to do when you hear about your idea: “That’s been done…” About twenty times in my career as a Computer Scientist and Public Inventor I have somehow informally presented an idea to someone or a group of people, only to hear them say, “That’s been done.” 27. Abstract + Flawless App Introduction Hello to all designers here! 28. Sergio Mattei: The Beautiful Humans Of Hacker Noon (Noonies Winner for Under 20ish Award, 2019) In Hacker Noon’s inaugural awards last year, we wanted to recognize the brightest and best, in tech, and the award category ‘2-or-3 under 20ish’, is for the ones who are super young, yet entrepreneurial and motivated. This is our sweet little Q&A with an awesome human named Sergio Mattei, who is the winner of the award. 29. Meet a Simple API for PDF Docs PDF API, fill, generate and e-sign PDFs 30. Creating a Free Feedback Platform From Scatch During Pandemic Hey there, sit back, relax, and enjoy the story about how namelss, an anonymous feedback platform was created all from scratch during the COVID pandemic. 31. Why We Need Open-Source Spirit We have gone through an era in which software and the Internet have devoured the world, and now we are all enjoying the convenience brought by software and the Internet. After returning for a few years, we can not imagine that express delivery is so convenient now, and takeaway is so convenient, everything is completely different from before. Even when we went out for tourism, a new model Airbnb or short-term rental appeared. In the old days, few people could imagine that there are so many people who rent out their free houses or even rooms for tourists. This was impossible to imagine before the prosperity of the Internet and software. 32. How To Code Faster with Hundreds of Shortcuts in TeaCode TeaCode is a time-saving app from Apptorium that gives you an enormous library of expendable code snippets for any programming language. Instead of typing the whole action, you can only put down the expander and it with unfold into a full section of code. Every time you use an expander, you save loads of efforts on hand-coding every line. Plus, you can create your own expanders in any language. 33. How I Made My Side Project Going Viral on Hacker News In December 2019, I finally decided to kill my side project after 12 months of coding. It was a tough moment, I felt disappointed and angry. 34. Bourbon Makers Face a Major Problem: Tariffs Kentucky distilleries are expected to pay more than $33 million in aging-barrel taxes in 2021 alone. That figure is 140% higher than it was 10 years ago. 35. Three Bs to Avoid That 2AM alert Solo founder, CTO for a small team, or side-hustler. The story is the same. When your app goes down, you’re on the hook. So, what can you do to reduce those dreaded 2AM page alerts? 36. The Unseen Areas Augur Your Future Failure It is 1943 and you are Head of the United States Eighth Air Force. Your mission is to destroy Germany's ability to wage war and free up the skies for the Allied Forces. The problem is that your Bombers are being zapped out of the sky like mosquitos drawn into the fire in a summery night. 37. How to Go About Planning a Hackathon? Hacks are novel creations or solutions to problems and the purpose of a Hackathon is to create them.  The word “Hackathon” comes from combining the words ‘Hack’ and ‘Marathon’, and implies a long sprint to create something useful in a single event. 38. How to Build a Product in Public And Get Traction Image by Jorge Guillen from Pixabay An increasing number of indie makers decide to build in public. Some do it via their blog, on Twitter, on an open page or via communities. But it can be incredibly daunting to makers who are used to build their products in a more private fashion. 39. A Couple of Nomad Makers: finding friends and side project profits This article is the second in a three part series. If you want to read the first one you can do here. 40. AVC Room Booking System Introduction Service Overview 41. Do You Know How to Fail Fast With Your Next Idea? I am sharing all the knowledge I gathered during my research in four months of testing different business ideas. Before starting investing lots of time and building an MVP (minimum viable product) you can test ideas with adtotyping and get some metrics without writing a single line of code. This process shows a powerful way to validate ideas with the help of Facebook. 42. Coding Does Not Need to Be A Curse While having an ability to build things is definitely a blessing, sometimes, however, it can prove to be a curse as well. I realized it when I was building KnowyKnowy. 43. Using a Spreadsheet to Build a Mobile App (in 3 hours) As a product builder↗️, I built micro tools to solve my own problems. For example: article tool, portfolio tracker, SaaS tracker, habit tracker, and finance tracker 44. How to build an effective MVP in 3 steps Building a startup! You have an epiphany and say to yourself: 45. 10 Ideas to Create a Daily Writing Habit This writing discusses ways to reduce barriers to creating a daily writing habit. 46. Skip the SSL w/ Serverless Telegram Bot via Now.js Note: these directions come without much conversation, let the hacking begin! 47. Elimo Impetus: a tiny S3 OSHW, FOSS System-on-Module In case you missed our latest update, Elimo Engineering designed a small, powerful Linux System-on-Module, designed for low cost and fast system integration. It’s FOSS and OSHW and sports all of the following: 48. Divide et Impera: Tips On Content Creation From a Full-Stack Founder When I'm working on any single project, I'm becoming bored pretty quickly. I'm sure that a lot of people will empathize with this feeling. When a project is fresh and new everything is interesting about it. However, when the newness is gone, and you're actually doing the day-to-day routine of just hardcore work, it can become pretty dull. 49. Find The Right Sponsor for Your Open Source Project The ongoing maintenance and growth of open source projects are clearly in the best interest of the software companies using them. And yet, raising money for an open-source project is difficult, and many developers struggle with finding the right sponsors for their projects. What is the best way to get the resources open source developers need to keep developing? 50. Product Marketing Tech Stack Options Under $100/Month User acquisition is one of the biggest struggles growing SaaS and app companies face. The right product marketing tech stack will push the number of new and active users up and decrease customer acquisition costs at the same time – the perfect recipe for a growing product. But marketing tools cost money, and growing businesses have tight budgets to keep. Use these tools to build a killer product marketing strategy at a total cost of less than $100 per month. 51. My Journey Of Going Viral With A Humble Github Project 🚀 I made a simple project which got spread in various tech communities and social media. Github featured it in 'Trending repositories of day' section. 52. Don't Make These Common Mistakes When Launching Your Website On October 22 I've launched online my first website. I'd like to share with you my experience. 53. Top 5 Challenges For Indie Hackers It's a tough lifestyle being a solo indie hacker. Here are some of the hardest parts. 54. A Beginners Guide to Developing, Recording and Releasing your Podcast This is how I developed and launched my first podcast, The Brave, in under 2 months 55. What if I got Hit by a Bus? – Taking Care of the Code You Created You, and you alone managed to birth your solution, despite the ambitious deadlines and resource constraints. The solution works - it’s standing tall on its own, but you know that it is but a gentle gust of wind away from needing your delicate and nuanced maintenance. 56. Top Articles This Week In Tech: WN 14 We hope you did have an awesome week! Here is your dose of the best
articles that came up over the last week. Have fun reading them! 57. Pet Projects are Fun I love pet projects, they are great excuse to use libraries and other technologies that you can’t use at work. Lately I’ve been working on a bigger pet project that needs to parse Go files, I’ve used ANTLR before to make this kind of things but unfortunately, ANTLR’s Go target has poor performance. So I began to search for alternatives written in pure Go and came across with this one, which took a different approach on creating parsers with Go, but before we’re going to understand how this library is different from others, let’s cover some basic concepts about parsing. 58. Our Nomad Makers Origin Story Our journey so far has comprised of one year in South East Asia, five months in Australia and New Zealand, two months in Berlin, two months in the UK, and one month in Eastern Europe. Now we’re working our way through South America, having explored Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia. At the time of writing we’re actually on a bus to Peru, trying to type while bouncing around on the terrible roads out here! 59. How and Why Makers Should Set a Deadline They Can't Extend Hi, makers:) 60. How we built an A.I Radio Presenter "Radio, we still love you." Thank you for checking out the 60 most read stories about Makers on HackerNoon. to find the most read stories about any technology. Visit the /Learn Repo

60 Stories To Learn About Makers

It's truly mind-boggling how we, as a society, are funneling vast amounts of money and precious resources into combating cybercrime instead of dedicating those valuable assets to fueling exciting innovations that could genuinely benefit mankind. The state of affairs is nothing short of exasperating. Cybercrime has become an insidious monster that devours our financial and intellectual resources at an alarming rate. We're talking about billions upon billions of dollars spent on security measures, investigations, and legal proceedings, all to combat the ever-evolving threat of cybercriminals. Meanwhile, while we're chasing after shadowy figures in the digital world, we're neglecting the monumental potential for positive change that awaits us. Think about it: with the colossal amount of money and resources being channeled into the never-ending battle against cybercrime, we could be fostering technological breakthroughs that have the power to revolutionize the world. Instead of the never-ending cat-and-mouse game with hackers and fraudsters, we could be channeling these resources toward exploring new frontiers of human knowledge. Medical research, for instance, is perpetually underfunded, with countless diseases still plaguing humanity. With the resources dedicated to countering cybercrime, we could be curing cancer, addressing the challenges of aging, or tackling the rampant issue of antibiotic resistance. The solutions to these problems are just waiting to be discovered, and yet, our priorities remain tied up in an endless cycle of battling malicious actors online. The environment is another pressing concern, and we all know how urgently we need innovative solutions to combat climate change. Our obsession with cybercrime is diverting our attention and investments from sustainable energy sources, carbon capture technologies, and more eco-friendly infrastructure that could save our planet from environmental disaster. The costs of inaction on these fronts are simply too high. Education is another area that desperately needs a financial boost. Millions of children across the globe lack access to quality education, and many talented minds go untapped because they can't afford an education that could enable them to make a difference in the world. Imagine if the were funneled into programs to enhance education accessibility and quality. We could unleash a generation of innovators and problem-solvers who could truly change the world for the better. resources wasted on cybercrime Innovations in renewable energy, space exploration, healthcare, and education could all benefit from the resources that are currently being sunk into an eternal struggle against cybercrime. It's not just about money; it's also the collective human brainpower and creativity that's being squandered on this uphill battle. What if all those brilliant minds currently occupied with outsmarting hackers or developing stronger encryption algorithms were working on projects to provide clean drinking water to impoverished communities, or to find a cure for Alzheimer's disease? Our priorities are skewed, and it's time to shift the balance back in favor of progress. We must acknowledge the importance of cybersecurity, but we cannot afford to let it consume the lion's share of our resources. We need a more rational allocation of our efforts and investments to prioritize the innovations that will genuinely benefit mankind. It's time for us to break free from the cybercrime quagmire and embark on a new era of exciting advancements that have the power to reshape our world for the better. The State of Global Cybersecurity The state of global cybersecurity has been nothing short of a rollercoaster in recent years, and let’s not sugarcoat it – it’s been one wild, treacherous ride! As if the world didn’t have enough problems to deal with, enter the opportunistic cybercriminals. The pandemic threw everything into a tailspin, as businesses hastily transitioned to remote work setups, creating a playground for these digital delinquents. In 2020, malware attacks shot up by a jaw-dropping 358% compared to the relatively calm year of 2019. It was like ringing the dinner bell for these cyber hoodlums. But the madness didn’t stop there. Cyber-attacks globally jumped by 125% through 2021, and the onslaught persisted into 2022, where our digital nightmares continued unabated. And then, Russia decided to waltz into Ukraine, setting off an explosion in the cyber threat landscape. Russian-based phishing attacks against the email addresses of European and US businesses surged by a mind-boggling eight times. It’s like they decided to go all-in on their digital conquest! Meanwhile, nearly 3.6 million Russian internet users had their digital doors kicked in during the first quarter of 2022, marking an 11% surge compared to the previous quarter. In an attempt to shield Ukraine’s vital infrastructure from these Russian rascals, the UK launched the ‘Ukraine Cyber Programme’ in 2022, slapping down an initial £6.35 million to combat the growing menace of Russian cyber shenanigans. The program is the digital guardian angel for Ukrainian government entities, providing incident response, DDoS protection, and a whole lot of digital fortifications to keep Ukrainian citizens informed and secure. Cyber battles, anyone? But here’s the kicker – phishing, that devious online crime, continues to reign supreme. In 2021, a staggering 323,972 internet users found themselves duped by phishing attacks, meaning that half of all data breach victims had fallen for this deceitful trick. As if 2020 didn’t have enough surprises in store, phishing incidents soared by a whopping 220% during the height of the pandemic. It’s like the bad guys just decided to kick us while we were down. And just when you thought things couldn’t get any crazier, 2021 saw nearly 1 billion exposed emails, impacting a whopping 1 in 5 internet users. No wonder phishing attacks are having a field day! But here’s the silver lining: despite its prevalence, phishing attacks seem to inflict the least pain, with victims typically losing an average of $136. That’s a far cry from the staggering $12,124 average cost of a data breach. In 2022, investment fraud took the crown for the costliest form of cybercrime, with an average loss of $70,811 per victim. If that’s not a slap in the face, I don’t know what is! The data breach epidemic is on a roll, folks. Since 2001, the number of victims has skyrocketed from a mere 6 per hour to a staggering 97, marking a jaw-dropping 1517% increase over two decades. You can’t deny the pandemic had a hand in this madness – 2019 had a relatively tame 53 victims per hour, but in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, that number shot up to 90, a whopping 69% increase. Digital mayhem, anyone? The price tag for data breaches is also on the rise. Back in 2001, individuals were dishing out an average of $2,054 per hour. Fast forward to 2021, and we’re staring at an eye-popping $787,671 per hour. Ouch! Businesses aren’t having it any easier, with data breaches costing them an average of $4.35 million in 2022, up from $4.24 million the year before. It’s like a heist that just keeps getting bolder! But here’s a glimmer of hope – the rising threat is finally making organizations worldwide sit up and take cybersecurity seriously. Seventy-three percent of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) agree that it’s time to take action, and 78% plan to beef up their investments in cybersecurity in the coming year. It’s about time! However, the bitter pill to swallow is that 67% of SMBs admit they lack the in-house skills to tackle data breaches. But fear not, because they’re teaming up with Managed Service Providers for cybersecurity, with the number climbing from 74% in 2020 to a whopping 89% in 2022. We’re not sitting idly by either. We’re in the trenches with various industries, especially those dealing with compliance and regulations. We’re right there, providing crucial IT support to law firms and financial services companies, because there’s never been a more critical time to fortify your cybersecurity defenses. Ransomware attacks, those digital ransackings, continue to haunt individuals and organizations and advanced attack methods are forcing victims to pay up, and roughly 236.1 million ransomware attacks were reported in the first half of 2022. Our Constant Waste of Time and Resources Leading cybersecurity firms are no strangers to pouring considerable time and resources into meticulously crafting extensive reports, replete with intricate statistics and profound insights. Yet, the critical issue at hand beckons us to delve deeper into this practice: does the relentless dedication to producing eye-catching charts and elaborate reports indeed form the cornerstone of a proactive strategy against the ever-present specter of cyber threats? This is a query that not only merits contemplation but also unravels the layers of a complex problem that extends well beyond the surface. I question whether these meticulously designed reports are enough to keep us ahead of the curve. The arms race between cybercriminals and cybersecurity experts rages on, with hackers constantly devising innovative techniques to breach defenses. The time and energy spent on compiling these reports could be seen as a valuable investment. After all, knowledge is power, and the insights offered can help organizations understand the evolving threat landscape. However, there is a growing concern that the approach taken by cybersecurity companies is, in some ways, reactive rather than genuinely proactive. It's not just about gathering data and showcasing it in an aesthetically pleasing manner. True proactivity involves actively developing strategies, tools, and countermeasures to stay one step ahead of potential threats. The reality is that we find ourselves at the intersection of art and science, where pretty charts and profound insights may not necessarily equate to a robust security posture. What we need is a shift in the paradigm, a move towards proactive problem-solving that isn't solely based on historical data and extrapolation. We Are Not Hunting Down Cyber Criminals Hard Enough! It's absolutely infuriating how we are failing to go after cybercriminals with the urgency and dedication that this modern age demands. In a world where our lives are increasingly digital, our dependence on technology is at an all-time high. And yet, despite the constant barrage of cyberattacks and data breaches, it seems like we are merely tiptoeing around the issue, rather than taking concrete and aggressive action against these criminals. First of all, let's talk about the sheer audacity of these cybercriminals. They operate in the shadows, exploiting vulnerabilities in our digital infrastructure, and they do so with impunity. The audacity of hacking into critical infrastructure, stealing sensitive data, and causing untold financial damage to individuals and organizations is appalling. Yet, it often feels like the consequences of these actions are far too lenient. Why are we not pouring more resources into tracking down these criminals? The sheer number of attacks on everything from government institutions to multinational corporations, and even everyday individuals, is staggering. It seems like we're more focused on a reactive approach, cleaning up the mess after a breach occurs, rather than actively pursuing and dismantling the criminal networks responsible. Part of the problem lies in the nature of cybercrime. These criminals often operate across borders, which makes prosecution more complex. But that's not an excuse for the lackluster response. We need better international cooperation and treaties to facilitate the extradition and prosecution of cybercriminals, regardless of where they hide. international Cybercrime is not a minor nuisance; it's a global threat that can have devastating consequences. We should treat it as such. The lack of urgency in going after cybercriminals sends a message that they can act with impunity. We need to change that message. It's high time that we make an example of these criminals. We should be imposing harsh penalties and sentences that act as a deterrent. The lack of significant consequences for cybercrimes only emboldens these criminals, making them believe they can evade justice. Ultimately, the world is far too interconnected and reliant on technology for us to continue to be so lackadaisical in our approach to cybercrime. We should be going after cyber criminals with every resource at our disposal, from the best technology to the toughest laws. The time for half-measures and reactive responses is over. It's time to take the fight to cybercriminals and show them that their actions will not go unpunished. You know, it’s really grinding my gears! The fact that so much of our precious time and resources in the technology sector are being funneled into cybercrime and cybersecurity. Don't get me wrong; I understand the importance of protecting our digital infrastructure. But isn't it time we started prioritizing innovation instead of constantly playing catch-up with cybercriminals? Billions upon billions of dollars are poured into fighting off cyber threats, and it's not that I don't appreciate the effort. We need to keep our systems safe and our data secure. But it feels like we're stuck in an endless cycle of reacting to attacks rather than taking proactive measures to prevent them. It's a bit like constantly patching up a leaky boat instead of building a more robust one. And let's not even get started on the allocation of these resources. Are we channeling our funds effectively towards hunting down these cybercriminals? Are we pursuing them with the tenacity and ruthlessness that they deserve? Or is it all just going down the drain, wasted on half-hearted attempts to stop the inevitable? It's time for a paradigm shift. We should be directing some of those cybersecurity billions into fostering new innovations in the tech sector. We're living in the 21st century, an age of rapid technological advancements, and yet it feels like a significant portion of our potential is being squandered on just keeping the lights on, so to speak. Innovation is what drives progress, what propels us forward as a society. Look at the monumental strides we've made in the past. But now, we're devoting so much of our attention to putting out digital fires that we're stifling the creative spirit that should be at the core of the tech industry. It's not just about the money. It's about the human capital, the brilliant minds, and the countless hours spent on tackling cyber threats. Imagine what could be achieved if we redirected some of that energy towards groundbreaking technological discoveries. And don't even get me started on whether the money allocated to cybersecurity is being used efficiently. Are we really making significant strides in identifying and prosecuting cybercriminals? Are we investing enough in international cooperation to bring these criminals to justice? Or are we just creating an illusion of safety while the true culprits roam free? It's time for a reckoning. We must balance the equation, not only defending against cybercrime but going on the offensive to dismantle the networks that propagate it. Let's stop reacting and start acting. Cybercriminals should be pursued with the same fervor as any other criminal. My Cyber Rant Concludes We need to channel our resources more wisely. Let's put some of that cyber-defense money into nurturing innovation in the tech sector. We can't keep pouring money into plugging digital leaks; we should be building a stronger, more innovative ship for the future. And as for chasing down cybercriminals, it's about time we allocated resources effectively and made them pay for their crimes. It's time for a shift, a change in the status quo, and a new era of technological advancement.

Resources Wasted On Cybercrime Instead Of Innovation

Let's learn about via these 65 free stories. They are ordered by most time reading created on HackerNoon. Visit the to find the most read stories about any technology. Ethics /Learn Repo 1. The Development of AI: Balancing Convenience and Ethics AI isn’t completely free from controversy. 2. Stop Teaching Ethics to Software Engineers 3. The Implications of Open-Source AI: Should You Release Your AI Source Code Publicly? In this article, I will share my thoughts on why it's better and safer to bring the new AI tech into the hands of business rather than release it into the wild. 4. The Ethics of Software Development with Uncle Bob Martin The clip is an excerpt from episode 15 of the Level-up Engineering podcast: 5. Creative AI ‘Shakes’ the Core of Humanity and Requires a Broader Discussion About Ethics The boundary between machine and humans was clear. But now the machine has become creative! Can self expression still be at the core of our humanity? 6. Ethical Hacking 101: Part 2 Ethical Hacking 101: Part 2 7. Is Building Digital Escapes Ethical? Digital escape is the idea of escaping the ‘real world’ through consumption of online content. In my piece on 2019 predictions, I wrote about how “in everyday life, you’ll take a stroll, but in electronic life, you take a scroll”. Since the beginning of time, humans have found escape in stories, art, games, human contact. In today’s world, we’re finding digital escapes in the form of scrolling through our Instagram feed, playing online games or even watching others play them on Twitch. Either intentionally or unintentionally, many social media platforms today have become spaces for digital escape. By building for user engagement and retention, platforms are incentivized to maximize the time users spend — essentially, building deep wells for digital escape. In this piece, I will explore the argument that building for digital escape, within clear boundaries, is not morally objectionable and can be value additive and creditable. 8. A Free Ethical OS Toolkit for Woke AI Enterprises Are your algorithms transparent those they impact? Is your technology reinforcing or amplifying existing bias? 9. Don't Be Data-Driven. Become Purpose-Driven and Data-Assisted. 10. On the difficulty of creating a data science code of ethics undefined 11. Can we be honest about ethics? The “manifesto for data practices” (datapractices.org), was produced by a Data for Good Exchange, sponsored by Data for Democracy and Bloomberg, promoted by former U.S. Chief Data Scientist DJ Patil. The document’s creators incurred no risk by creating and promoting it, so it should not be surprising that the product fails to live up to its own ethical standards. We won’t fix ethics by fixing those tools, the creators of those tools built systematic bias into their products before deploying them. 12. The Ethical Implications with Algorithmic Trading Between the 2000 dot.com boom and bust and the "Big Short" of the 2008 credit crunch, we heeded the wisdom of the legendary traders of the 20th century - guys like Jesse Livermore (1920s) and Paul Tudor Jones (1970s). The wisdom was to be dispassionate (no emotion) and trade methodically (like a robot) - executing trades mechanistically every time. Of course, for the previous generation of traders, the rise of the PC and internet and exchange APIs meant that much of this "mechanistic" work could be automated. Most of the technical and methodical signals can be algorithmically determined and acted upon. The trader is merely the strategist and commander who decides when which algorithm (trading method) should be applied. 13. How to save A.I in 3 easy steps Do the benefits of artificial intelligence outweigh the risks? 14. Ethical AI: Who Watches the Watchmen? The Axial Age saw the independent rise of multiple societies, each with their own set of religious and cultural practices. The silk road arguably marked the end of the Axial Age, connecting these previously isolated cultures together in a network that traded not only goods and germs, but also ideas. 15. The hidden risk of ethics regulation Regulating the tech industry won’t fix its ethical problems, it might make them worse. Mike Monteiro has written the most compelling argument I have seen for regulation. Regulation would address many of the kinds of ethical risks that have made headlines recently. But I think it would leave many risks in place and introduce new risks — a more systemic risk, in fact — that in the long term would actually expose the public and the industry to more potential downside that it currently faces. Regulation at scale requires rules that stipulate what is ethical and what is not, in the case of the discussion of the ethics. 16. Why You Should Learn Ethics of AI With This Free Online Course Besides being known as the happiest country in the world, Finland is a technology leader, ahead of China and the US. 17. Revisiting Open Source in The New Decade Lots of times, companies that are hailed as heroes of open source often do things that violate human rights or go severely against freedom. These can range from predatory practices and anti-repair designs to even using child labor in third world countries. 18. The Question of Ethics in Decentralization The importance of ethics in a decentralized world. 19. The Metaverse isn't New - So Why is Big Tech Acting Like it is? We already had the tech for a VR renaissance in the mid-aughts. What's The Metaverse and why the renewed interest? One word: Money. 20. We Need to Teach Silicon Valley to Be Ethical The tech industry’s ethics problem is the longest running game of “Not it.” No one wants to take responsibility for teaching men-children millionaires and honestly, that’s fair. We’re not the ones at the forefront of Silicon Valley, however, someone has to do the dirty work. 21. Data Analysts As Arbiters of Truth Coming out of college with a background in mathematics, I fell upward into the rapidly growing field of data analytics. It wasn't until years later that I realized the incredible power that comes with the position. 22. Alternatives to Corporate Consciousness We must conceive of a new kind of group consciousness, something alternative to corporate consciousness, that is capable of production on a large scale. 23. The Ethics of Machine Learning: Understanding the Role of Developers and Designers We know that the whole world is fascinated by the tools that are using Machine learning and deep learning algorithms and they are fun to use. 24. The Universal Benefits of PDF/UA With over one billion people worldwide affected by disabilities, there is good reason to make digital content more accessible. When it comes to digital PDF docu 25. Five Questions About AI Bias You Probably Wanted to Ask 5 main questions from a panel discussion on bias in AI. Panelists offer insights into the sources of bias, the responsibility of developers and Ai's future. 26. The New York Fashion Act is a Step in the Right Direction The recent New York Fashion Act is a revolutionairy demand, setting precedence to enabling transparency in the fahsion industry. 27. The Importance of a Media Strategy in Communication Plan Media strategy is a medium-term communication plan that taking into account the marketing tasks of your brand. The main objectives of the media strategy is to make a fundamental choice of communication channels and marketing promotion of the brand products and assess the estimated costs of its implementation. 28. Towards Cruelty-Free Fashion with Lab-Grown Fur and Leather With consumer conscientiousness on the rise, more and more brands are finding ways to adapt to an ethical production of fur and leather. 29. Deus Ex Machina: fA.I.th in the age of Artificial Intelligence Religious doctrine may yet be of some use in the New Tech World 30. Ethical Concerns About AI are Overrated Thanks to AI, we can send, receive and process vast amounts of information near-instantaneously.  But there is still much work to be done. 31. Victim Bias and Blockchain We live in an age where "Fake News" is rife. Could a verifiable voting system be the solution? The problem is "fake evidence" is at best a self-serving distraction. It's a way of pretending to believe in an alternative world. 32. 11 Reasons Why CEOs Got Fired And Companies Got Sued in 2020 Although a typical CEO remains in the role for about seven years, legal issues pose major threats to these positions and, ultimately, company or shareholder val 33. 5 Ways We Can Work to Close the Gender Gap in Tech It’s really not as hard as it sounds 34. Understanding the 'Data is the New Oil' Analogy Earlier, we lived in industrial and post-industrial societies, and gas and oil were the only things of value. Now, it’s the age of information society and data has replaced petrol as the economy’s driving force. The reason is that with the help of Big Data, people significantly improve production efficiency and business economics. That’s true. 35. A product manager’s 64 insights from 2022 In an attempt to hedge my bets against AI, many of my insights this year reflect on the human vocations I believe a machine will always struggle with. 36. Intelligence Explosion by AI and Its Impact on Superintelligence “What if the great apes had asked whether they should evolve into Homo sapiens [and said] ‘Oh, we could have a lot of bananas if we became human’?” — Nick Bostrom 37. How Biodiversity is Harmfully Affected by the Overlapping Effects of Fast Fashion Biodiversity is crucial for the sustainability and fruition of Earth, however, the effects of fast fashion are acting as a major detriment. 38. What Is the Future of AI Rights? As AI advances to a point where it could become conscious, even autonomous, when is there a moral requirement to consider the extension of human rights for AI? 39. Looking Within to Battle Intrinsic Bias in AI Intrinsic bias. We’re all guilty of it; it’s part of what makes us human. But we should always strive to be better and fairer, and to eliminate these biases when they arise. This is especially true in today's workplace, where the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technology risks hardcoding these biases into the future of work. 40. Refocusing Your Business: From Profit to People Rethinking The Bottom Line: From Profit to People 41. ChatGPT: A Potentially Dangerous New Source of Misinformation ChatPGT sounds credible but it is frequently wrong. 42. Is it Ethical for Media Outlets to Use AI to Write Stories? If media outlets are hiding their usage of AI-generated content, is it because this is ethically wrong? 43. Polyester: A Sustainable Option? Polyester is the most widely used modern fabric in the world, yet raises a question between the boundaries of sustainability and convenience. 44. Ethical Considerations When Approaching Scientific Content We need to employ healthy doubt and curiosity when reading scientific content as popular science books do not always get their facts straight. 45. Poll Finds About 1 in 3 Professionals Use Cannabis at Work Companies might have another concern to navigate: drug use. 46. Bitcoin Is the Currency of the Gods Discounting is the single most important concept in finance and possibly economics. It’s the idea that money (cash) is less valuable tomorrow than today. The reason is quite existential: our impending death. 47. What Is the GIAC Penetration Tester (GPEN) Certification? You need to ensure your resources are put to the best use. With that in mind, it is important to know more about what the GIAC Penetration Tester Certification 48. Affiliate Marketing Can Be Dangerous But Is It Always Bad? Affiliate marketing has become the norm among review sites. I don't know if a review site exists without any affiliate links. On one side, people hate this because the reviews are poisoned by green. But, on the affiliate's side, why would they write something without getting compensation? 49. 🖥 The Ethical User Interface What makes the user interface ethical? Give the user enough options, that they keep their autonomy. But not too many, that they become paralysed by choice. 50. Podcasting And Ethical Dilemmas When starting a podcast, it is normal for a host to want to grow the podcast as much as possible. The desire to grow might lead a host to take actions that are not moral. A host has to keep in mind that taking these shortcuts are short-term solutions. Any misdeeds will either backfire or not help in the long-term. 51. Gene-Modified Babies: Essentials of the Bioethics Subjecting 'Designer-Babies' for Future Parents The ever-moving technological advancement has led us to the era where maintaining a downed Facebook server has become more important compared to the preservation of our own species, which is now considered as 'optional'. 52. The Sinister Side of Instagram Filters Over time, social media platforms have grown and transformed into abilities and features. They first started as platforms used for tagging and connecting with long lost family members and friends. But now, they have transformed and are used for uploading and sending selfies with filters thanks to apps like Snapchat. 53. Google's Search Algorithm Affects Our Lives in More Ways Than One [A Deep Dive] For better or for worse, Google has become one of the biggest vendors of information in the world. Its library of search results shape and/or reaffirm opinions on a daily basis. The search giant's algorithm dictates what information searchers receive and thus has a direct impact on every person's knowledge base and understanding of numerous topics. 54. 4 Things Humans NEED in an AI-Led World As the world moves forward, those working with AI — meaning almost all of us — need to take the ethical matter into our own hands. 55. IoT: Is Data Beyond Ethics? Over the last decade, the Internet of Things has been delivering heaps of data and remote device control across virtually every industry, from healthcare to hospitality. 56. Great News About Self-Regulation In VPN industry: i2Coalition’s VTI Essentials In the last decade, the VPN market has been steadily growing, and this growth was spiked even further in 2020. Two main reasons contributed to an even more expansive use of VPN software: 1) Covid-19, quarantine, and work from home set the needs for home network security; 2) cybercrime has been on the rise and cybersecurity became a more common issue. 57. Why Algorithmic Fairness is Elusive In 2016, Google photos classified a picture of two African-Americans as “gorillas.” Two years later, Google had yet to do more than remove the word “gorillas” from its database of classifications. In 2016, it was shown that Amazon was disproportionately offering one-day shipping to European-American consumers. In Florida, algorithms used to recommend detention and parole decisions on the basis of risk of recidivism were shown to have a higher error rate among African-Americans, such that African-Americans were more likely to be incorrectly recommended for detention who would not go on to re-offend. When translating out of a language with gender-neutral pronouns, and into languages with gendered pronouns, Google’s word2vec neural network injects gender stereotypes into translations, such that pronouns become “he” when in conjunction with “doctor” (or “boss,” “financier,” etc.) but become “she” when translated in conjunction with “nurse” (or “homemaker,” or “nanny,” etc.). 58. How to Embed AI Ethics into your Work Culture AI ethics has long been a hot-button issue. For some, it’s reduced to debate about whether AI should be making decisions traditionally reserved for humans. 59. Lessons Learned From Sharing 30 Fake Stories Created With ChatGPT Insights and lessons from a fake news experiment. 60. Coronavirus: A Test For Modern Technology and Tethics ICYMI: The spread of the new strain of Corona virus known as Covid-19 has caused massive disruption to daily life- be it social or economic. 61. A Summary and Review of The Ethical Algorithm A summary and review of: The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design by Aaron Roth and Michael Kearns. 62. Ethics, AI, and Responsible ML: Design Principles and Potential Dangers As we enter the 2020s, it is interesting to look back at how life has changed over the last decade. Compared to your life in 2010, most of you reading this probably use a lot more social media, watch more streaming video, do more shopping online and, in general, are “more digital”. Of course, this is as a result of the continued development in connectivity (4G becoming prominent, with 5G on the horizon), the capability of mobile devices, and lastly, the quiet and transparent adoption of machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, in the services that you consume. 63. Open Source is Broken The Open Source movement, as championed by the OSI, prizes absolute openness above all other concerns. Openness, they claim, is an absolute good, from which all other virtues flow, not to be questioned or criticized. It doesn’t matter if that openness enables evil in the world, without openness we cannot have truly collaborative software development communities. So the claim goes. 64. Make Software Great Again: Can Open Source be Ethical and Fair? Is there a way to go beyond open source, and have ethical, fair software in a cloud-first world? This is what some people in the open source community think. 65. AI is Not Something to Be Trusted or Not Trusted Is A.I. a revolution or a war? A god or a pet? A hammer or a nail? Do we really need more metaphors to describe it? Nowadays, A.I dictates what information is presented to us on social media, which ads we see, and what prices we’re offered both on and offline. An algorithm can technically write and analyse books, beat humans at about every game conceivable, make movies, compose classical songs and help magicians perform better tricks. Beyond the arts, it also has the potential to encourage better decision-making, make medical diagnoses, and even solve some of humanity’s most pressing challenges. It’s intertwining with criminal justice, retail, education, recruiting, healthcare, banking, farming, transportation, warfare, insurance, media… the list goes on. Thank you for checking out the 65 most read stories about Ethics on HackerNoon. to find the most read stories about any technology. Visit the /Learn Repo

65 Stories To Learn About Ethics

Day trading is like a fascinating game that rolls chess, poker, and gaming into an exciting package, adds the adrenaline rush of a roller coaster, and flavors it with a few dashes of lemon and a pinch of salt. Trading is a great struggle between illusion and reality, and in many ways, a cruel maze of tricks within tricks. However, if you are one of those who can create a plan, follow a strategy with strong discipline, handle your gambling demons, and accept trading as a profession, you can possibly make it... after 3-5 years of hard study. Trading attracts people who love challenges. However, only a lucky few can stand out of the crowd and make a fortune out of thin air. These people need to have a vast amount of experience, know how to keep their cool in the face of natural greed/fear impulses, and be savvy about the psychology of the masses. They need to gather some initial trading capital, but also have some money in reserve for critical situations and slump periods, because these are statistically proven to happen to all traders - it is just a matter of time and cardinality of trades. Knowing when not to trade, when to take a break and step back is a critical part of risk management. Most of all, you need a working trading system that suits your needs and trading style. If you have all of these, the last piece of the puzzle is to embrace the following tenets: “The goal of a good trader is not to make money; the goal is to trade well.” “Making money is more important than proving to yourself you were right.” “Your effectiveness in trading is proportionate to the hard effort you put into trading.” “The greatest lesson in making money is the experience gained from losing money.” “Try to enter as close as possible to the point where you were wrong. Never fight or question the price action.” “If you have a will to win, you will win. This article is split into two sections. The first part is a window to the life and mind of a master trader with more than 15 years of experience in both crypto-related and regular stock markets. This is the part of the knowledge sharing. The second part introduces you to basic trading products such as spot, swap, or margin. Part 1: What the life of a day trader is like: an interview with a successful cryptocurrency trader, who wishes to remain anonymous. Thank you so much for accepting my invitation for an interview. To kick this off, tell us something about yourself and what led you to trading crypto and the stock markets? I actually didn't get straight into trading at first. I was participating in classical hardware and cloud mining for cryptocurrencies, and then doing some minor investments, which led me into stock market trading. After that, back in 2016, I learned about crypto trading, and I can say it was a blessing, since I could use existing methods used in the stock market that worked pretty effectively in crypto, too. How did your journey start? My first experiences with trading were unusual. I made quite a bit of profit during several week-long periods without any knowledge but inevitably broke the streak then and suffered brutal losses. Many people quit after losses, but in your trading failures, you can gain plenty of experience to become a success. That's why it is important to journal your losses and find what connects them, fix the issue, and move forward. Many people have a great start when they start trading, but they get drunk on early success and crushed a few months later. How were your first trading months? I agree some people do get drunk on trading in crypto because it is such a speculative market, but in the stock market, it's a lot tougher. How many years do you think it could take for somebody to become a successful trader? It depends on the person and their lifestyle. The traits you grew up with can naturally make you a successful trader. So I don't think it's measurable in time, and it's really about who you are that determines how quickly you can adapt to the market. Consider thinking about one's lifestyle habits overall and make game-changing life adjustments such as tuning sleeping habits and adding regular workouts. Sometimes, it is not about trading only but more about building a better life. What was your breaking point from an average trader to a successful trader who can do whatever he wants? Discipline was the only thing I needed to learn. As soon as I realized the importance of discipline and persistence, I started to grow and become what I am today as a trader and as a human being. That and a lot of backtesting. I recommend this to all who are at their trading beginning to add a daily 30 minutes backtesting timeslot to their daily schedule if they really want to improve and boost their confidence when entering trade setups in real-time. What are the key aspects one needs to embrace to become a decent trader? Tough question, but again it can be summed up as discipline, patience, and persistence. Many people fail a couple of times and fall for what's called “revenge trading”, which means irrational trading after you lose, hoping you get lucky and win back the losses quickly. But as you can guess, they will only go further down the spiral most of the time. It is also critical to absorb a lot of knowledge that will help you to create your own opinion. When you start to listen to your inner voice while following the plan, you are on a good path. Only following others simply gets you nowhere in the long run. Then, hide your Profit and Loss (PNL) indicator. (PNL is the difference between profit and loss in trading.) Don't observe the money you may be gaining or losing; trade the setup, not the PNL. What are the most frequent trading demons that could possess a trader and cause account bankruptcy? FOMO (fear of missing out), greed, and not following your backtested trading plan. But if I were more specific, it would go like this: Exited too soon Exited too late Entered too soon Entered too late Taking too much risk Didn't take a planned trade because of self-doubt To fight these demons and get rid of them for good, avoid these pitfalls and give yourself a point for each successful and flawlessly executed trade. You are cured when you have five positive points at each of these. However, If you collect ten bad points for a single item mentioned below and you cannot stop, you are probably doomed to be a non-trader. (Screenshot from 2011 - explaining the Demon Finder principles) Feel free to make a copy of the above-mentioned GoogleDoc and use it. What about the path to becoming a trader? What milestone do we need to pass first before entering the Valhalla of trading? Always try to protect your capital. Trading is one of those professions where you need to have both skills and capital. Without money there is no trading. Also, you need some money to back yourself up. At least a month of paper trading to start. Then, develop 2-3 strategies and backtest them hard on at least 100 samples. Then start with 1% of your capital per trade. You can move this up to 3% per trade but only if your hit rate is about 60%. When you hit a sequence of 4 losses in a row and you feel that you are completly out of the zone, decerease the trading size from 1% to 0.5% until you will get like 2-3 winners that will get you back to the game mode. Of course, there are traders that have 85-90% hit rate. These guys trade big numbers and the only thing they need other than meeting trade conditions is to have enough liquidity. Trades like this usually have from 0.8 to 1.3 R (Risk/Reward Ratio) while not using much leverage. Personally, I found that around 2.5R is my mostly reached﻿ target. What method do you use for trading? I use many things now since I like the effect of pulling a lot of Aces from up my sleeve. I'm always trying to add essential books to my library and use something new here and there. Currently, I trade crypto using Elliott Wave (EW), Price Action (Pat) combined with some basic Candlestick knowledge, and some Moving Average (MA) strategies. But one needs to understand the smart money concepts to create a successful trading method. Some great sources are free to watch on YouTube, such as: PhotonTrading MentFX PhantomTrading In the stock market, it's a bit harder, so I use Volume Price Analysis (VPA), EW, Candlesticks, trendlines, and some chart patterns even though some of them are getting obsolete. It is also good to have a basic overview of the news that moves the market. However, I am not a “news” trader. The capability of reading the market bias is more important than the strategy used, though. Markets tend to seek liquidity that lies in zones of inefficiency. Markets return to these zones to balance themselves. Try to use monthly, weekly, and daily charts to spot those inefficiencies, such as fair value gaps (FVG), equal highs or lows, and other liquidity stores, such as liquidity pockets that form around multiple touched trendlines. When you mark these zones, try to imagine a path the market needs to accomplish to reach these areas before it changes direction or continues further after a pullback. What is your top advice for somebody who wants to be a great trader one day? Do it for yourself, not for the money. Really, the best thing about trading is it can teach you a lot about the values of life that will guide you to a better lifestyle. A better lifestyle then morphs you into a better version of yourself, and as the better version of yourself, you can make the people around you happier. Personally, I get a lot of these values from a fellow named Jim Rohn, who left his teachings for the world to learn from. He was an avid businessman and motivational speaker who amassed a vast fortune from nothing. Then also, don't try to make each day a trading day. Sometimes you can observe the market and not make a single trade since the stars don't align in your favor. Never trade when you don't have an edge. Trading is like poker with one critical difference. In a game of poker, you need to play each hand with cards you got. In trading, you can wait for the proper hand and then trade it perfectly. If you have a will to win, of course. What was your greatest win and your most "redonkulous" fail in trading? Well, my greatest win would have to be everything compounded that I've acquired over time, but the most in one single trade, if I can remember, is 2500% on a leveraged BTC position. I've lost it all before, so nothing can be more of a failure than that. But I believe that failures will give you the experience to succeed. Do you have any more secrets for being a good trader and long-term success? There aren't any secrets. All the information is out there, and most of it is free… However, you need to be passionate about what you do no matter what it is. If you don't like what you're doing, you're not going to be successful in it. That's what I believe, but I do have a passion for the art of trading. And yes, I do like the money that comes with it, but I love the ability to predict. It might seem cheesy, but it's like being a wizard and seeing into the future a little bit. Sure, sometimes I'm wrong, but those times I'm right are just great. Then, of course, learn to anticipate, not participate. Stop chasing pumps or the moves that are already on the go - good traders don't trade because something is moving. Your time to enter this was 5 minutes ago. You can jump into a trade for a quick grab and go, but if you stay in it, you are just sacrificing your capital for somebody else's success. Do the opposite. Start laughing at the chart and be glad that it is going so well without you. Then, prepare to trade the retest, since almost every good entry is retested at some point. Then, you have to learn to have patience with great trades, but also imperial impatience with trades that don't look good or that are eating through your stop-loss (SL) zone. Observe, adapt, execute within a few seconds. It's all about doing non-stop quick adjustments as the situation develops. And lastly, be aware that as a retail trader, you are easy prey for Market Makers (MM), when trading on emotions. To be successful in the market, learn to move with MM, resist their calls to sell, when all they are doing is selling a ticket to “destination fucked” for as many traders as possible before they do the counter move. Defeat the market by defeating your emotions and your urge to trade first. Then, be patient and execute as your backtested setup showed you. That's right. I agree. As an intelligent trader with experience under your belt, you agree that no guru is going to make you rich in the long run, is that right? Exactly. You need to love what you do and be ok with doing it on your own. Only then can you do it for endless hours and still feel full of life and motivation. Tell us about your average trading day. Well, it's just like any other person's day except for the fact that I don't drive to work. I walk across the hall to my office. I wake up at 5 in the morning, take a shower and get to the charts, watch pre-market for stocks, and check my overnight holds for crypto. Then, I do a few hours of trading, and sometimes I don't trade if the opportunity isn't there. I'm only really working for 1–2 hours, and I usually just read until something pops up. Some days I don't even bother checking and go out for the day. I like to keep my life balanced between work and play. What are the most inspiring books you have read? Trading or otherwise! Lots of reading and knowledge from people who have been successful in the field. As a kid, I read The Richest Man in Babylon by George Samuel Clason, and this was my gateway to more comprehensive books like Trading in the Zone by Mark Douglas. For self-improvement, I really enjoyed Master Your Hidden Self by Serge Kahili King and The Truth by Neil Straus. If you could time travel and give advice to yourself before you started trading, what would it be? Don't wish for things but make sure you are doing the maximum to make it happen. And of course, enjoy what you do. If you don't enjoy what you do, it will be hard to get through the part in which you are not profitable, and you will mostly give up. And maybe also that the pain is temporary, while the pride is forever. Well said. The end of the knowledge-gathering section. The next part will introduce you to the world of Bitcoin DeFi trading products that could be considered as an alternative to other DeFi platforms such as Uniswap (Ethereum-based) or Centralized exchanges (which mostly require KYC and deposition of your assets to their control). Decentralized finance (DeFi) is an emerging financial technology based on secure distributed ledgers similar to those used by cryptocurrencies. The system removes the control banks and institutions have on money, financial products, and financial services. Decentralized finance uses the blockchain technology that cryptocurrencies use. A blockchain is a distributed and secured database or ledger. Applications called dApps are used to handle transactions and run the blockchain. Part 2: Find the proper trading playground So, did you enjoy the interview? Are you motivated to go explore, learn and participate in this high-risk/reward environment now? If the answer is yes, then I say good! The following will introduce you to other trading prerequisites and to common trading products. While studying, reading, observing, or doing courses is a vital part of learning, the most crucial part of the learning path of becoming a day trader is getting down in the figurative trenches, and trading—making decisions in real-time, writing notes, and analyzing your trades. To start your trading journey, use a browser-based technical analysis (TA) tool, such as , for paper trading or just as your "trading sandbox" for all your charting observations, and journal entries. TradingView Then, you will need a trading platform with an easy-to-use interface. Start by experimenting with small amounts of real assets. This is the best way to start, as you will experience what it’s like to trade with "real money," even if just a few dollars are on the table. A brief introduction to the world of cryptocurrency trading products or is where you buy an asset you believe in or have researched, with the plan of selling the asset for a profit in the future. 1) Swapping Spot buying allow you to Long and Short, which means you don't buy the asset per se, but put up collateral to take a position on market direction. You make money by forecasting the market's future price. Using leverage (1x-5x) can enhance your profit if you have a technical analysis or fundamental edge. 2) Margin trades NOTE : Very often, you do buy the underlying asset using margin trading. If you use bitcoin as collateral and buy bitcoin on margin, you hold that bitcoin that you purchased. But when bitcoin’s price rises in the future, it is highly likely you will have to sell it to pay back the loan (that you leveraged) but still hold onto the bitcoin 'profit'. It depends if you are trading derivatives or not. Lastly, 3) Perpetual Futures A perpetual futures contract—or perpetual swap—is somewhat similar to an ordinary futures contract in that it allows traders to speculate on the future price movements of cryptocurrencies. The core difference is that perpetual swaps do not have expiration dates. Traditional futures have expiration dates, which forces the price to track the spot price due to arbitrage between the contract and spot price, with the settlement date in view. You can take on the risks and rewards of the spot price movement without actually buying or selling the asset. You cover the risk by supplying margin assets that cover any losses you experience if the price moves against your position. Outro Good luck on your trading journey! Learn from your mistakes. Journal your trades and mostly your aftermath-like observations! If you have a will to win and keep improving, you are on the pathway to success! Don't get discouraged in the first 2-3 years of learning and trading since most traders made it into positive months after five years of active trading. So, don't think about you as a trade you will be in next year, but think about yourself as a trader who needs to be here five years from now, working hard to improve and adapt Remember: -> Stay patient. Also, . Find a trading community, be proactive, work hard and talk about your journey with others. If you simply don't know where to start, I can give you two tips: -> don't be afraid to ask for help 1) of 2) Monthly subscription-based (150 USD) trading group called with many live streams you can watch, many chat possibilities to ask and grow, and a lot of materials delivered by skillful traders you can use to your advantage. However, the best thing is their kind and friendly attitude. Optionally, signup to the Whop platform, from the space of which you can and get a 5 USD bonus. Free discord community Mindo Chroma join Chroma using the following link -> Be rigid in your rules but flexible with your expectations﻿. And lastly, if your trading portfolio is below 1000 USD, . Buy a book, watch a course, practice what you have learned, and journal what you found out. -> invest in yourself and your future success first Don't trade to make money; learn first how to survive, protect your capital, and trade well overall. - Mickey Maler See you in the trenches!

Becoming a Day Trader - Interview and Introduction to the Trading Products

Convertirse en un comerciante de día: entrevista e introducción a los productos Bitcoin DeFi

Devenir un day trader - Interview et introduction aux produits de trading

एक दिन का व्यापारी बनना - व्यापारिक उत्पादों का साक्षात्कार और परिचय

デイトレーダーになるには - インタビューと取引商品の紹介

Tornando-se um Day Trader - Entrevista e Introdução aos Produtos de Negociação

Trở thành Nhà giao dịch trong ngày - Phỏng vấn và Giới thiệu về Sản phẩm Giao dịch

成为日间交易者 - 交易产品的采访和介绍

Welcome to the Round 5 results announcement of the brought to you by HackerNoon and ! Let’s see who won. Blockchain Writing Contest Tatum The Blockchain Writing Contest July 2022 Nominations & Winners As usual, we picked all the stories with the tag on HackerNoon, published in July 2022. Then we chose the top stories using 60:30:10 weightage respectively to: #blockchain Number of hours read The number of people reached The freshness of the content Here are the top 10 nominations: by What Happened to Terra Luna? @juxtathinka by No, Bitcoin Is Not Going to Fail! @AR by A CIA Agent's Guide to Steganography, Fooling the KGB, and Protecting Your Crypto @officercia by Is There Still Hope for the Future of Blockchain? @chixzyoge by From Trending to Falling Apart: A Reminder of the Importance of Blockchain Regulation @growthpunk by Laplace’s Demon Speaks: Is Something 'Alive' in Blockchain? @officercia by No One Knows RACA Has Been Manipulating The Entire Community - Part 1 @alextokflow by Cryptocurrency vs. Fiat Money: Everything You Need to Know @0xdelken by Who is USER221? @youngdegen by A Water-Cooling Upgrade That Can Give Bitcoin Miners Their Power Back @cryptofiresidepress by The editors’ favorite this month is A CIA Agent's Guide to Steganography, Fooling the KGB, and Protecting Your Crypto @officercia Unlike cryptography which hides the contents of a secret message, steganography hides the very fact of its existence. Steganography was first introduced in 1499, but the method itself has existed for a very long time. Legends have brought us a method that was used in the Roman Empire: a slave whose head was shaved was chosen to deliver a message, and then text was applied with a tattoo. After the hair grew back, the slave was sent on the road. The recipient of the message would cut off the slave's hair and read the message. on winning the first position. Well deserved! You’ve won 500 USDT! Congratulations @officercia , The place goes to by second From Trending to Falling Apart: A Reminder of the Importance of Blockchain Regulation @growthpunk While we await the international community to lay down a harmonized regulatory package on all aspects of blockchain-based business models, let us attempt to protect ourselves by choosing to align with projects that think ahead of the regulation curve. Projects that prioritise user protection and safety, and projects that want to comply with existing and coming laws and regulations. Well done, ! You’ve won 300 USDT! @growthpunk by has won the position. Laplace’s Demon Speaks: Is Something 'Alive' in Blockchain? @officercia third By establishing a core set of rules (enforced through smart contracts, for example), software can take the form of organisms in this new world and effectively compete for the scarce resources available on the blockchain. Each instance of software can be, like any living thing, self-serving and seeking to survive and reproduce. And as each genealogy of software develops, it improves not just in isolation but in its desperate attempt to out-compete all of the other software in the environment. Congratulations You’ve bagged another 100 USDT in the same round! @officercia ! The title of the most-read story goes to by What Happened to Terra Luna? @juxtathinka The Terra Luna crash was a defining moment in the world of cryptocurrency: it drove home the point that cryptocurrency in any form would always be volatile. Investors who believed in the ability of $UST to remain pegged to the US dollar lost faith in $UST and became more wary of Tether $USDT. The suspicion that not all stablecoins are actually backed by reserves resulted in less trust for cryptocurrency stablecoins and tokens in general. Cryptocurrency critics had a field day describing cryptocurrency as a Ponzi scheme in which investors had been played, not once but twice with Terra Luna. The cryptocurrency industry as a whole suffered, losing investors and over $400 billion in value in terms of crypto market capitalization. Yay, ! You have won 100 USDT! @juxtathinka On that note, let’s wrap up the announcement! We will contact the winners shortly. Keep an eye on to see the current and upcoming writing contests! contests.hackernoon.com See you all next month. HackerNoon and/or any of its employees, representatives, and/or contractors shall never ask for your wallet seed, your secret keys, private keys, and/or mnemonics to your wallet. Treat such emails with distrust - as you should any email/SMS that asks for such private information. Always remember, he/she/they who have your keys have your wallet. Do not hand out your wallet to internet strangers!

The Blockchain Writing Contest 2022: Round 5 Results Announced!

Concurso de escritura Blockchain 2022: ¡Se anuncian los resultados de la ronda 5!

Le concours d'écriture Blockchain 2022 : les résultats de la 5e manche sont annoncés !

ब्लॉकचेन लेखन प्रतियोगिता 2022: राउंड 5 के परिणाम घोषित!

The Blockchain Writing Contest 2022: 第 5 ラウンドの結果が発表されました!

Concurso de Redação Blockchain 2022: Resultados da 5ª Rodada Anunciados!

Cuộc thi Viết về Blockchain 2022: Kết quả Vòng 5 được Công bố!

2022 年区块链写作大赛：第 5 轮结果公布！

What are DAOs? DAOs are Decentralised Autonomous Organisations. In other words, they are non-hierarchical organizations in web3 funded and owned by crypto investors or communities. DAOs are popularly known for their lofty ambitions. But can they change the world as we know it? Let’s find out from the following examples! AssangeDAO In early February, AssangeDAO came into the limelight as the social crusade DAO that pulled in more than $50 million (17,422 Ether)on JuiceBox, Ethereum’s fundraising protocol, to finance the legal expenses of the embattled Australian whistleblower Julian Assange who was fighting an extradition battle in British court. Through AssangeDAO, the WikiLeaks founder’s cause struck the right cord with many of his supporters spread across various crypto communities, and it was the desire to set him free that led to the creation of a DAO with millions of American dollars pouring into its crypto treasury. No sooner was AssangeDAO formed than it trended on Twitter and gained a huge press coverage in the mainstream media. But within the crypto community the spotlight was on the new record it had set as the highest funded DAO on JuiceBox, a position that was previously held by ConstitutionDAO, the $47 million DAO that wanted to buy a rare copy of the US constitution at a Sotheby’s auction in 2021. At the fundraising level, AssangeDAO was a massive success story in the history of web3 funding as a result of its ability to rally a section of society to Assange’s fight for freedom. But this would not halt the skepticism that was soon to engulf it. FUDists, crypto haters, and the George Soros of this world had a field’s day booing AssangeDAO and laughing about its adopted posture of readiness, while others predicted that the hype surrounding it and the excitement it had inspired within the crypto community and beyond would not last longer than the decline of Constitution DAO. However, AssangeDAO was at its height before the extradition battle was lost to the US government in May. But the power of blockchain technology to bring people together in the fight for justice is what it represents to many within and outside the crypto space to this day. MoonDAO MoonDAO, an internet collective founded in November of 2021 to decentralize access to space, is another public-spirited DAO exemplifying how DAOs can harness both human resources and capital for social change. It is consistently ranked as the fourth-highest funded DAO on JuiceBox, the Ethereum-based fundraising protocol, and it recently sponsored Coby Cotton of the Dude Perfect fame to outer space on Blue Origin’s NS-22 mission. The founding of MoonDAO stemmed from a funny idea to bid for lunar asteroids at the Christie’s but it later transformed into a social project to sponsor ordinary people to space and open up access to its economy. The loftiness of its mission was such that it raised a whopping $8.3 million on JuiceBox within a short window of time and to the vast astonishment of the crypto community. When viewed through the social impact lens, it is at least plausible to say that MoonDAO is uniting humanity, shaping the future of space travel and building a space-fairing civilization. After all, decentralizing access to the space industry means empowering ordinary people to explore the terrain and experience zero-gravity and high-altitude conditions, something which is considered to be the luxury of the ultra-rich. Finally, on the 4th of August, MoonDAO, represented by popular YouTuber Coby Cotton, became the first DAO in space following the successful launch of Blue Origin’s NS-22 mission. This milestone mainly represented MoonDAO’s resolve to reach new frontiers in space travel and exploration in the coming years. Ukraine DAO When the Russian-Ukrainian war entered its first week, the global community became increasingly alarmed by the devastation that the war was to unleash on the citizens of Ukraine. And for the first time in history an internet collective with nothing but a pile of crypto assets or an official war chest(ukrainedao.eth)rallied the world to a cause that made Russia the aggressor. The founding of Ukraine DAO was a timely response to aid the prosecution of the war by the Ukrainian soldiers who were bound to put up a fierce resistance against the invading Russian army. And what began as a Twitter account run by Alona Shevchenko few days to President Putin’s official declaration of war soon became a political cause to aid Ukraine’s military efforts and a global campaign to stop the raging war. The sterling example that UkraineDAO has come to represent in crypto gives one a deeper understanding of the potential benefit of a crypto community and how much power it has to move the world with the speed of a gazelle, the commitment of an army, and the power of the world’s most disruptive technology. DomainDAO Talking of disrupting a billion-dollar industry, let us get excited about the value proposition of DomainDAO, which, in a nutshell, is to register .(dot)dao as a top-level domain(TLD)under the ICANN rules and guidelines. This bold move raises the question of what the future of domain ownership will look like in the years ahead. But one thing is certain, DomainDAO will be able to unleash a torrential amount of disruption in the domain space when DAOs begin to dump such web 2 TLDs as .(dot)com and .(dot)io. DomainDAO, simply put, is a solution-oriented DAO in the same way that most DAOs can be described when they propose to solve a particular problem as an internet collective. It is able to satisfy this requirement by proposing to stand up to the monopoly under whose yoke the domain industry has been writhing, and the good news is that the decade-old anti-monopoly sentiment is in its favor. As a public-spirited entity, the starting point for DomainDAO is the agenda to democratize domain ownership in web 2 for its web3 product and if it is ever able to translate this vision into reality it would become the DAO standard for emerging DAOs plying the same route. Most importantly, it will usher in a future where ordinary people can shape the domain industry. Conclusion The underlying philosophy of a DAO is making a difference in society or impacting an organized sector of the economy. Leveraging a DAO can thus be the most effective way to rally netizens to a cause or the most viable tool for building trust among the various communities in web3 and onboarding the mass of mankind to the era of decentralization. Also Published Here

Do DAOs Have the Ability to Change the World?

The cryptocurrency and blockchain skeptics are having a field day. Ever since the TerraUSD collapse in May, they’ve been lining up to write crypto’s eulogy, goaded on by the woes experienced by , , , and other firms. And with bitcoin and altcoins remaining far below all-time highs, there’s every chance other dominoes will fall in the coming weeks, as overleveraging and risk comes back to bite the market. Celsius Three Arrows Capital Voyager Digital BlockFi It’s hard to deny that the cryptocurrency industry is going through a crisis right now. That said, an argument needs to be made that the crypto critics have gone too far in declaring the end of the industry, and yes, some are talking as if the entire industry is about to die: https://twitter.com/JohnReedStark/status/1542506752456896518 Sure, there’s little doubt some platforms and companies are going to disappear in the next few months, but the cryptocurrency and blockchain sector will continue. Why? Well, because its potential for extracting wealth from (retail) investors makes it far too lucrative to ignore. Yes, in contrast to those who claim crypto will survive mostly because it promises a revolution in technology and money, this article will play Devil’s advocate and take a more cynical view of its survival. Meeting the growing chorus of crypto skeptics halfway, it will -- for the sake of argument -- run with the claim that crypto is all-but useless, but still affirm it’s here to stay because it’s a great vehicle for ripping off the public. precisely Not only that, but crypto’s capacity for wealth extraction makes it a perfect fit for the mainstream financial system, which in the past few decades has increasingly revolved around using fees, penalties and arcane instruments to siphon money away from its customers. ‘Finance’ Means Transferring Wealth to Already Rich Creditors It’s worth acknowledging that the crypto skeptics -- of which David Gerard, Amy Castor, Jacob Silverman (and Ben McKenzie), Nicholas Weaver and Stephen Diehl are some of the most prominent -- may be right about many things. This includes their concerns regarding Tether and its unaudited reserves, about how blockchain has yet to find a significant use case outside of crypto, about how Bitcoin consumes a prodigious amount of electricity, and so on. Yet the skeptics’ principal failing is that they talk about cryptocurrency as if it’s an anomaly, as if it's some kind of freakish alien entity that has descended from another dimension to infect an otherwise sane financial system. On the contrary, it’s merely the latest outgrowth of an economic and financial system that has been becoming more antisocial, lawless and self-serving since at least the ‘70s. Exhibit A: , meaning overdraft fees, ATM fees and maintenance charges. To provide some figures, , while JPMorgan, Wells Fargo and Bank of America, to name only three, respectively $1.5 billion, $1.3 billion and $1.1 billion in overdrafts in 2020. banks have been generating a greater share of their respective revenues from service fees over the past several years overdraft fees collected in the United States amounted to $15.47 billion in 2019 collected As everyone reading this article remembers, 2020 was the year the outbreak of Covid-19 became a pandemic, marking a period during which . And as many people can guess, overdraft fees disproportionately impact the less financially advantaged, with from 2016 showing that 18% of account holders pay the vast majority -- 91% -- of all such fees. What’s more, 67% of frequent overdrafters earn less than $50,000 a year, with these overdrafters being overrepresented among the lower income brackets they inhabit. some eight million Americans slipped into poverty Pew Research Center data The point of all this is that mainstream banks are in no way averse to becoming even richer off the backs of making the general public poorer. When you couple the imposition of fees with that of interest (which ), a picture emerges of a morally questionable industry, one which is based around monopolizing money in order to make more money. accounted for $44.5 billion of JPMorgan’s net income last year Indeed, with , and , it’s hard to argue that the banks have any compunction about profiting from hardship. That much should be evident from the financial crisis of 2007-8, which stemmed from reckless speculation and profiteering, and which resulted in bailouts for banks and a recession for the rest of us. US credit card debt currently standing at $930 billion with inflation and the cost-of-living crisis driving more people into debt This brings us back to crypto. Let’s just assume, for the sake of argument, that crypto is useful only for making money off retail investors (either via charging the latter fees or by dumping bags onto them). This would still make it a prime vehicle for the banking and finance sector. In fact, banks have steadily begun introducing various cryptocurrency brokerage and custody services, with a from April reporting that Bank of New York Mellon, U.S. Bancorp, State Street, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America are among the major financial institutions that have started “to capitalize on the popularity of cryptocurrencies to offer related services to clients.” Reuters article Many of these names have begun enabling their clients to trade cryptocurrency (in exchange for a fee, of course), highlighting their willingness to use cryptocurrency as another source of profit. They do not care whether crypto or blockchain represents a meaningful technology; they simply care whether they can tap into it as yet another source of income. And given their sheer size and , their embrace of crypto may be decisive in pushing it onto the rest of us. lobbying clout Crypto Is The Tip of the Iceberg It also can’t be overstated just how comfortable major banks are with financial instruments that have little or no basis in reality, that are there purely for the sake of speculation and creaming fees/interest off of clients. Just remind yourself of credit default swaps and synthetic CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), which were instrumental in the 2007-8 financial crisis. Basically, these derivatives were bets on other financial instruments, with only the most tenuous link to the real economy. Taking credit default swaps first, the latter were a kind of ‘insurance’ contract whereby an investor (or more often, a short seller) would pay a regular premium for the right to collect a large payout if some mortgage bond(s) collapsed in value (usually because of mortgage defaults). Here’s author Michael Lewis describing credit default swaps in explaining how they existed purely as sources of income/profit for investors and banks: The Big Short, “On its surface, the booming market in sidebets on subprime mortgage bonds seemed to be the financial equivalent of fantasy football: a benign, if silly, facsimile of investing [...] When Mike Burry bought a credit default swap based on a Long Beach Savings subprime-backed bond, he enabled Goldman Sachs to create another bond identical to the original in every respect but one: There were no actual home loans or home buyers. Only the gains and losses from the side bet on the bonds were real.” Not only were said gains real, but they eventually resulted in the near-collapse of the banking system, imposing hardship on millions. The same goes for synthetic CDOs, which were piles of credit default swaps packaged into one big bond, with the sole purpose of generating more premiums and -- potentially -- a huge payout. On the long end of such CDOs were investors who collect regular payments from the investors on the short end, who in turn were basically betting that a bunch of subprime mortgage bonds would become worthless. Here’s Michael Lewis again, describing the reaction of investor Steve Eisman to synthetic CDOs. Eisman famously purchased a large quantity of credit default swaps in the runup to the 2007-8 crisis, yet even he reported being dumbfounded by the sheer scale of the financial sector’s lust for meaningless (yet income-generating) schemes: “Now he got it: The credit default swaps, filtered through the CDOs, were being used to replicate bonds backed by actual home loans. Wall Street needed his bets in order to synthesize more of them.” There weren’t enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end product. Admittedly, synthetic CDOs have become pretty scarce since the Great Recession. However, , with globally in 2021. other dubious products have risen in prominence in the years since collateralized loan obligations reaching a value of $1 trillion Some researchers have warned that such products “ .” If that weren’t enough, there’s also research which suggests that the finance sector as a whole is a net drain on wider society, extracting more wealth than it provides. could cause the next global financial crisis For instance, in a 2016 research paper titled, “ ,” Professor Gerald Epstein of the University of Massachusetts and Juan Montecino of Columbia University calculated that “the financial system will impose an excess cost of as much as $22.7 trillion between 1990 and 2023, making finance in its current form a net drag on the American economy.” Overcharged: The High Costs of High Finance Epstein and Montecino based their calculations on an analysis of three things: rents and excess profits; misallocation costs, meaning the opportunity costs of diverting capital and resources away from potentially more constructive (non-financial) endeavors; and crisis costs, in this case the impact of the 2007-8 financial crisis. Along with the University of Sheffield’s Andrew Baker, in 2018, finding that the net cost of the British finance sector to the UK between 1995 and 2015 was £4.5 trillion. “This total figure amounts to roughly 2.5 years of the average GDP across the period.” they conducted a similar study focused on the UK Without multiplying examples, it should be fairly clear by now that the global financial sector is less interested in social utility, and more interested in exploiting the public for its own gain. In other words, it wouldn’t really care if cryptocurrencies are worthless technologically, so long as they can be used to generate “rents and excess profits.” This is why they have begun turning to crypto, with . It’s also why the aforementioned Steve Eisman had the following to say about the sector, as quoted by Michael Lewis: French banking giant BNP Paribas being the latest to enter the crypto custody game “That’s when I decided the system was really, ‘Fuck the poor.’” This system now includes cryptocurrencies. The embrace of the latter by the banking industry will be enough for crypto to continue its controversial existence, even if it never develops any ‘significant’ use cases. Banks will increasingly offer crypto-related services, because as exchanges such as Binance and Coinbase have found out, the real money in cryptocurrencies is to be had in charging people to trade and hold them. Just witness the fortunes amassed by such luminaries as Changpeng Zhao, Sam Bankman-Fried and Brian Armstrong, all of whom helm exchanges, and all of whom . rank among the sector’s richest individuals Why Investors Will Continue Turning to Crypto One obvious counterargument to this analysis is that it ignores the question of why investors will continue trading cryptocurrencies, particularly if we spend another five, ten or twenty years without crypto producing a ‘killer app.’ That is, surely the hype train will run out of steam if crypto spends another decade without impinging on the real world in a tangible way? And just because banks would want to sell crypto to their clients doesn’t mean these clients will actually want to buy it, does it? Such reasoning is naive. Crypto has done a good job over the past decade or so of coming up with new trends, concepts and/or buzzwords in order to keep the hype cycle revolving, from DeFi and NFTs to Web3 and the metaverse. So why would it run out of ideas in the future, particularly when many of them can hide behind clever marketing and celebrity endorsements? More importantly, such sub-sectors within crypto are incidental to what the space is really about: speculation, or gambling. If you want to know why retail investors will continue pumping money into crypto, you need only look at the lottery. In the United States, , up from $89.6 billion in 2020. In the UK, , representing its best year ever. And in Germany, . state lotteries sold tickets worth $105 billion in 2021 the National Lottery generated just over £8 billion in sales in 2021/22 lottery sales equalled €7.9 billion in 2021 There’s the market for crypto, right there. Then you have figures for the gambling industry, which . Again, this is a big figure, indicating the huge demand there is among the general public for the rush that comes from opening oneself up to the extremely remote possibility of becoming rich. This , and it’s what will keep the sector going for many years to come, regardless of its size or real importance. generated a record $44 billion in revenue in the US in 2021 is exactly what crypto taps into Of course, all of the above is not to say that cryptocurrencies and blockchain are without merit. Rather, it’s to say that crypto can survive even without merit, which seems to be something most skeptics are claiming it can’t. They’re wrong, as is anyone else who claims that the demise of the cryptocurrency sector is somehow ‘inevitable.’ Yes, it has suffered a few bankruptcies in the past few weeks, but nothing short of outright prohibition will stop it from being picked up again (and again) as a tool for vacuuming money from the public. Let’s just hope it develops more use cases than this in the not-too distant future.

Against the Skeptics: Why the Crypto Crash Isn’t the End of Blockchain

Contra los escépticos: por qué Crypto Crash no es el final de Blockchain

Contre les sceptiques : pourquoi le crash de la crypto n'est pas la fin de la blockchain

संशयवादियों के खिलाफ: क्रिप्टो क्रैश ब्लॉकचेन का अंत क्यों नहीं है

懐疑論者に対して: 仮想通貨のクラッシュがブロックチェーンの終わりではない理由

Contra os céticos: por que o crash das criptomoedas não é o fim do blockchain

Chống lại những người hoài nghi: Tại sao sự cố tiền điện tử không phải là kết thúc của chuỗi khối

反对怀疑论者：为什么加密货币崩盘不是区块链的终结

When the name of MoonDAO’s governance token was to be decided by its members, the choice was clearly between $Mooney and $Cheese. A poll was held to decide which one of the two names would be on its smart contract. At the poll, a total of 67 votes were cast in favor of $Mooney and it, although a small number, represented an overwhelming majority at the time when MoonDAO had a little above 1000 members on Discord. $Mooney was deployed on the 17th of December, 2021, marking the beginning of a major funding round that would later rank MoonDAO as the fourth-highest funded DAO on  JuiceBox,a crowdfunding Dapp. Initially, the deployment of $Mooney was aimed at raising $450,000 for a space ticket but it ended up pulling in $8.3 million by early February. To many , it was nothing short of a surprise for a DAO with no media publicity to be three spots away from ConstitutionDAO, which, at the time, was the most funded DAO on JuiceBox and the most popular DAO of the year. MoonDAO’s Funding Timeline The First Two Days MoonDAO raised $115,133(29.50 ETH) in two days in December of 2021. The First Four Days On the fourth day a total of 70 donors brought the figure to $135,000 which was then the equivalent of 33.58 ETH. JuiceBox Top Ten DAOs On December 22nd 2021, MoonDAO ranked as the 10th most funded DAO on JuiceBox with a total of 34 ETH. It was nine spots away from ConstitutionDAO which ranked as the highest-funded DAO with a total of 11,612 ETH($47 million). This was the fifth day of the fundraising. **(JuiceBox Top Ten)** The First Six Days The sum of $145,000 (39 ETH)was raised to the utmost surprise of everyone in six days, thereby increasing MoonDAO’s chances of achieving higher milestones in crypto funding. MoonDAO’s Fifth Position on JuiceBox. In 22 days, MoonDAO had not only become the 5th highest funded DAO Juicebox but had also surpassed its initial funding target as well. With $638,000 in its treasury, it was inching closer to $1 million in crypto funding. The Last  Four Days. The event of  January 12 to 16 will be remembered as a watershed in the history of MoonDAO’s funding because its treasury pulled in more than $1 million in ETH until it reached a whopping $8.3 million(Over two thousand Ether)on the last day. This was the ‘the last four days” of the fundraising which earned MoonDOA the fourth place on JuiceBox. **(MoonDAO crossing the 1,000 ETH threshold)** January 12, 2022. MoonDAO was four days to the end of its major fundraising and at this stage it had far exceeded its initial funding target. On the 12 of January, 2022, it had raised a total of $858,000 (265.33 ETH) and was cruising toward $1 million in funding. $1.4 million and counting.. January 14th and the whales The Whales were having a field day as MoonDAO’s treasury was zooming past 1000 ETH. MoonDAO at $3.8 million(1179.89 ETH) and still counting... January 15th and the last 24 hours With only twenty-four hours left to the end of the fundraising, MoonDAO’s funding goal was increased from $5,000,000  to $8,888,888--which was dubbed a lucky number. In the final hour, it triumphantly reached $8.3 million and ended as a massive success.

How MoonDAO Raised $8.3 million on JuiceBox

It has been a rough month for Bitcoin and the overall stock market.  The S&P 500 is down 16% since March, the Nasdaq down 22% in the same period, and Bitcoin has fallen from its November high of $68k all the way to $28k. Crypto projects have been failing fast - the stable coins turned out to , and everyone is out to dunk on crypto as a whole. not be stable It’s not a good look for DeFi when the industry that was formed to replace traditional finance is attempting to quickly centralize and , and the market has dragged down Bitcoin with these projects and the broader market selloff. raise stability funding Throughout the downturn, the internet has stayed undefeated and we at least have some ‘top in hindsight’ memes as stock prices come back to earth and the market quickly pivots to and profits. valuing cash flow Bitcoin in particular has never shied away from heavy criticism, and with a 24% drawdown in the last month, Peter Schiff has had a field day and the WSJ and comment sections are back to dismissing bitcoin as tulip mania. “Bitcoin is rat poison” - Warren Buffet “Shadowy super coders” - Elizabeth Warren “Destabilizing nations” - Hillary Clinton “Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam” - Donald Trump “I personally think Bitcoin is worthless” - Jamie Dimon “A Ponzi Scheme”, “Waste of Energy”, “It has no cash flows” … Now nearly four years old, (and 12-sided die) with common Bitcoin FUD eloquently captures all of this skepticism, and as we head into what looks like a recession, the FUD dice continue to be rolled on a daily basis. Nic Carter’s excellent piece Any sarcasm aside, however, it is valuable to revisit any investment thesis in a downturn, and as someone invested in and building on bitcoin (my new lightning network explorer is ), it is a good idea to go back to basics and revisit the ‘why’ and original conviction for Bitcoin. here The first step to identifying any potential value that Bitcoin provides is agreeing on and acknowledging that there are problems to be solved.  If no one thinks there are any problems with the status quo, Bitcoin will always be a ‘waste of energy’ and a ‘Ponzi scheme’. In this spirit, we will take a step back and in this article, we will pose four fundamental questions that can help reconfirm the ‘why’ behind Bitcoin (or any other solution for that matter) so that we can then better address the ‘how’ and valuations. #1 - Does having a form of money solve a problem? The concept of money is nothing new and has been around since nearly ~5,000 BCE when the ancient as currency. Mesopotamians introduced the shekel In his book, , Saifedean Ammous offers rich insight into how the early inhabitants of Yap island used the Rai stone as a form of money. The Bitcoin Standard Whatever the historical medium has been- shells, gold coins, rocks – having a form of money reduces the need for market-making and everyday bartering.  We can’t barter all day long, and we can’t horde commodities in our garages to store our earnings. With this thought, we see the functions of a useful money then as a medium of exchange, a measure of value, a standard for deferred payment, and a store of value.  Money must also have properties of fungibility, durability, divisibility, portability, and scarcity. Money is ingrained in every part of society, and with money that most closely resembles the properties above to satisfy the associated problems, we can acknowledge many of the benefits it provides and problems it solves. (For anyone who wants a more in-depth look at what is money, its history, and its relation to capital allocation, I’ve created this YouTube video that goes into much more detail) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZfmnuSR644 #2 - Do payment networks solve a problem? The ‘medium of exchange’ function of money has evolved over the years with technology.  We may have used coins or bills in the past, but today, e-commerce represents of all purchases. 13.2% Total totaled $5.5 trillion in 2021, and US Ecommerce Retail Sales grew more than 31% in 2020, totaling $762 Billion. US Retail Sales Visa, Mastercard, and Paypal have capitalized on this payment infrastructure (digital and in-person) with 2021 revenues of $24.1 Billion, $23.6 Billion, and $25.4 Billion respectively.  Visa and Mastercard combined to facilitate of card transactions in 2021. ~70% With these sorts of numbers, it is fair to say payment networks solve a problem. We can even go one step further and talk about the ~3% fees that these networks charge, or the worldwide average .  There are many more problems to solve here, but we’ll save that for another day.  For now, we can confidently say that with Visa processing up to - there is inherent value and problems being solved in the payments space. ~6% remittance fees 24,000 transactions per second #3 - Does fiat money have problems? These first two points are (hopefully) easy to agree on, in that #1 - we need a form of money, and #2 - payment networks facilitate the exchange and transmission of money, which provides value to society. But what form does (and should) our money take?’.  We looked at early forms of shells and coins.  And up until 1971, the US money system was backed by gold. Today, in the US and around the world, money is a fiat system, with no underlying commodities backing our monetary systems.  Is this a problem? Is fiat money the best form of money that we should use to preserve the efforts associated with our labor?  Does fiat best represent the monetary properties we look for in a form of currency? To best understand the problems of fiat money, it helps to understand the who/how/why of money creation, so let’s take a … step back towards basics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK_rYS8L3kI The (US) Government raises money in two ways: (1) Collecting taxes (personal income, corporate, capital gains, etc) and (2) Issuing Debt (IOUs) via T-Bills, T-Notes, and T-Bonds. We haven’t had a balanced budget , and as such we commonly rely on debt to fund government operations. since 2001 Anyone can purchase US Government debt, and auctions take place weekly allowing individuals, corporations, and countries to all purchase our debt.  In many ways this debt is good - it pulls forward investment activity and when the funds are used to grow output and the overall economic output, which is a win for everyone. But that’s not where the story ends… one of the largest purchasers of US Government debt is the US Federal Reserve.  And it is ‘how’ the Fed purchases this debt that is problematic.  The Fed obscures this process through complicated terms of ‘quantitative easing’ but what it really boils down to is they click a few buttons and digitally create (or physically print) new money. The Fed then sends this new money to the government in exchange for the IOUs (T-Bills, T-Notes, T-Bonds). So for example, when the US Government passed legislation for of spending in the CARES act and Covid relief programs, we see an asset (in the form of an IOU) added to the Fed’s balance sheet and an asset of new cash and corresponding IOU as a liability on the government’s balance sheet. $4.2 trillion Is all of this a problem?  Should the 7-member Federal Reserve Board be able to issue $4 trillion of brand new money into existence at will? This isn’t all.  Commercial banks also create money at will through our fractional reserve banking system.  The Fed sets the reserve rate (how much of a bank’s deposits must be on reserve with the Fed) and the federal funds rate (which translates to the percent commercial banks receive for deposits with the Fed), all of which get passed onto consumers and businesses in the form of loans, mortgage rates, etc. When the Fed sets a as it did throughout Covid, the Fed has effectively given commercial banks the ability to create unlimited money. reserve rate of 0% All of this money in the system is measured in the M2 totals, which have increased to match all of the Fed’s money creation rates.  In just the past two years, the money supply has increased more than $6 trillion - a 37% . increase So back to the question…is this fiat money standard a problem? If Bitcoin is a ‘Ponzi’ or ‘rat poison’, I hesitate to speculate on what our current fiat system represents... Is this the best we can do as a society to offer mechanisms for preserving wealth over time? If you’re still not convinced this is a problem, we only need to turn back the clock a few times in the past century to see where government and Fed intervention devalued our currency. In 1934, FDR signed the gold reserve act into law and then overnight devalued the US dollar by 40% In 1971, President Nixon ‘temporarily’ ended the convertibility of USD to gold.  This transitory measure became permanent, and just five years later all references of the convertibility of gold to USD were removed. And over the last 20 years, we see spikes and continued run-up in the Fed’s balance sheet - from less than $1 Trillion in 2002, to now nearly $9 Trillion in 2022.  This ~12% CAGR easily outpaces the S&P 500 returns over the same period. The devaluation of fiat money is not a one-time in history.  It is a standard operating procedure.  And with our current political system’s incentive structure, it is in no one’s best interest to make sure that we balance our budget when we have the option to simply kick the can down the road. (There is a lot to unpack in how money is created, and I’ve created this video to go into additional detail). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-I8VpA3pPA #4 - Is Inflation a Problem?  Is inflation a result of money creation? It was supposed to be “transitory”, but now inflation has become the talking point of the last year.  Just this last week Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk both (in seeming agreement) tweeted about the negative effects all of our money printing has had on inflation - pushing back on narratives from the Biden administration, Senator Warren, and others who have long promoted narratives that everything is - or better yet “ ”. Putin’s fault corporate greed There is no denying inflation.  CPI is officially at in the US and we can see firsthand price increases across the board. .  And inflation is the most regressive tax on society.  Historically we have taken a lack of inflation for granted in the US, but more than live in countries with double-digit inflation (and remain without access to a bank account). 8.3% A dollar today has the purchasing power of $26 in 1913 1.1 billion people 1.7 Billion adults But is inflation a direct result of money creation? For all the talk about how Putin is responsible, CPI has been above 5% since May of 2021. As for “corporate greed” at the grocery stores, we can just look to Target’s in first-quarter profit this week and stock drop of more than 25% following their latest disappointing quarterly earnings. 52% drop Are there supply and demand issues at play causing increased prices?  Of course.  And Cathie Wood has some good about potential deflation coming due to higher inventory levels.  But the $6 trillion new dollars we put into circulation over the past two years is more than 15x Saudi Aramco’s entire 2021 revenue. points Velocity of Money is at all-time lows ( ).  If we assume that a good portion of this low velocity is due to consumers not spending during the pandemic (not going on trips, not buying gas on commutes, not going to social events), then if the velocity eventually returns to a 1.5x, GDP will appear to jump some 30% (assuming no more new money).  If we assume that real GDP grows ~3-5% then the only explanation for the increase in GDP would again be continued higher inflation. 1.1 vs 1.5's of past We all recognize that printing and giving every person a million dollars would result in inflation.  So when we create $6 trillion dollars in such a short time frame, we have to expect some level of inflation. Conclusion - Is Bitcoin the Answer? We have outlined four problems and premises: (we need to be able to exchange goods and store value across time). Money as a function has value (we need to be able to transmit value across space and time). Payment Networks have value - most notably that it is inherently inflationary, devalued every year, and the rules of the game are changed at the whims of a 7 member board of governors. Fiat money has problems .  It is an invisible tax on those without assets, it centralizes power in the hands of a few (central bankers), and it subverts democracy when we can print money at will rather than make hard decisions on raising the money via taxes. Inflation is caused by money printing and is detrimental to society If we can agree that these are indeed problems, we can begin to look at the merits, specifics, and valuation metrics of Bitcoin or any other possible alternative that could plug into these problems/solutions.  Of course, that becomes a more nuanced discussion, and I’ll work to get some more articles on that in the future. I would love to hear your input on any of these points - please feel free to connect with me on .  As full disclosure, I am long Bitcoin, so I welcome any counterpoints that would revoke my theses. Twitter I’m also .  You can browse all details of the Lightning Network in this explorer, and would I love to get in touch with you if you are currently or interested in running a node or would like overall lightning network data ⚡🙏 building analytics for the Bitcoin Lightning network Also published here

Does Bitcoin Actually Solve a Problem?

¿Bitcoin realmente resuelve un problema?

Bitcoin résout-il réellement un problème ?

क्या बिटकॉइन वास्तव में एक समस्या का समाधान करता है?

ビットコインは実際に問題を解決しますか?

O Bitcoin realmente resolve um problema?

Bitcoin có thực sự giải quyết được vấn đề không?

比特币真的能解决问题吗？

In 2020, daily ransomware attacks . Because so many businesses rely on electronic and Internet storage for their data, they are vulnerable to cyberattacks. increased by 50% Remote work compounds the problem; data gets shared across multiple apps and cloud services, IT departments can’t monitor security weaknesses in workers’ homes, and remote workers are more likely to use personal devices. Cybercriminals are having a field day with the remote era. Cybercrime pays: in 2015, reported ransomware damages amounted to $24 million.  By 2020, the amount had ballooned to $ . Even giant corporations aren’t safe; earlier in 2021, Colonial Pipeline suffered the largest attack on a US energy system, costing $4.4 million. The largest reported ransom payment from a cyberattack came this year with JBS to the tune of $11 million. 170 billion Yet while these attacks were well-publicized and both companies will make a full recovery, not every business will have that chance. Of small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), 66% fell victim to at least one cyberattack last year alone. Of those attacked, 60% go out of business within 6 months of a data breach or hack. A cyber attack can cost a business everything. The money a business loses goes beyond the ransom and extortion; businesses have to pay for recovery efforts and (at times) new devices. Companies also lose business due to disrupted productivity and shattered reputations among customers. What do cyber insurance policies generally cover? Cyber insurance isn’t a bulletproof shield, but it can remedy the worst damage a cyberattack causes. SMB's cyber insurance policies usually cover up to .  Coverage can include profit losses, including that which arises from reputation damage or halted operations, liabilities from contract penalties and media fines, and lawsuits including class-action and regulatory investigations. $1 million in damages There are gaps in coverage, however. Most policies don’t cover physical property, long-term losses, or loss of intellectual property. Despite these gaps, . By 2028, SMBs may be putting 5-20% of their IT budget towards preventing cyberattacks against them. See more in the below. most companies see cyber insurance as worth their while infographic

Is Cyber Insurance Worthwhile?

I like to analyze my past work through the prism of evaluating my mistakes (I’m sure my therapist would have a field day with that one). I launched my first publicly available engineering project in early December and as George W. Bush once said, “Mistakes were made”. I studied CS at Carnegie Mellon for undergrad and as part of my classes I built a number of projects. But it’s one thing to build something for a class where maybe one or two people will use it for a brief period and another altogether to ship something for the general public. Upon graduation I worked at Google for 3 years where, as you can imagine, they make it pretty much impossible for junior engineers to royally screw anything up (though I still found a way to, but that’s a story for another day). After about a year of operating as a traditional recruiting agency (where we also made ), my co-founder (and twin) had learned enough to launch a free software product to help engineers find new jobs in a non-annoying and non-spammy way. For about three months I was heads down building our tool that would index open engineering jobs across the internet then hand-match an engineer to 5 job openings each month that matched their preferences and qualifications. plenty of mistakes While I was maniacally coding my brother was building our beta audience of early users. By the time we were ready to launch we had 142 users completely signed up and ready to receive our job recommendations (we’ll talk about the mistakes we made in building that audience in our next post). After launching it took me all of a minute to realize I made a big mistake. Talk about a let-down. All-in-all our beta launch has been a success. We’ve gotten really positive feedback from our early users, we know exactly what features we need to work on next, and we have a better sense of what kind of engineers find the most utility out of our tool. But my goal here is to highlight the engineering mistakes I made to help you avoid the same ones when you launch your next project. I also want to have this as a reference so I never repeat these errors. 1. Didn't test properly (or the horrible, no good, very bad start) In order to receive job recommendations from us you have to complete a basic form so we know what kind of engineering roles you’re looking for and where. Now, before we had that form built we threw up a landing page and collected emails to see if people would be interested in what we were building. When the signup form was ready we emailed our mailing list prompting them to complete that form. This was a really big moment for us. Anyone who completed the form would officially receive our job recommendations! My brother wrote the email, nervously hit send, and less than two minutes later we had four emails letting us know the form didn’t work. Womp womp. This was one of the lowest moments in our company’s history. We never wanted to be a recruiting agency. We did that for a year to learn what software product we could build to help engineers learn about new jobs. When we were in the drudges of recruiting the launch of a software product was the light at the end of the tunnel. So now, in our first big moment for that product, something was wrong. We tested that form. We tested it robustly with different inputs. We really, really tried to break it. So what happened? When I built the signup form I had to change the way our backend was structured. When we were just collecting email addresses we didn’t need much of a schema. But now we had users and attributes about those users so we needed a real database structure. When the new schema was built we migrated all of the people who signed up with their emails to this new schema. When these people then tried to complete our signup form they got an error saying “this user already exists”. When we had tested the form we only tested it with new email addresses not in our system. Luckily, we were able to quickly fix the error (after 5 minutes of pure panic) with the help of these very generous early adopters. This seems like such an egregious error in hindsight. It’s funny, I’m a solid developer but when working on this project I was juggling so many balls in the air that I made some basic mistakes. At Google I was bowling with bumpers. When those bumpers got removed it’s like I had to re-learn some of the basics. Some things you only really learn by messing them up and I can assure you I won’t make this mistake again. 2. DevOps will be the death of me Let me preface this section by saying I don’t know anything about DevOps. As in, I almost never deployed code to my own server. So when building this project I was looking for a service where I could push code to production and our site just worked with little tuning or configuration involved on my end. I worked on the Google Cloud team during my Google tenure so I figured that’s what I should use when launching this project. This was a mistake (I’ll expound on the reasons why next). The overall lesson here is that I should have avoided the and ditched GCP when there were early signs that it wasn’t what I was looking for. sunk cost fallacy My experience with GCP and AppEngine was not at all what I wanted. I assumed that AppEngine would be flexible enough to easily cater to our stack (Django, Angular, and at the time MySQL). I also assumed that AppEngine and any other Google Cloud Product like CloudSQL would work nicely together with little configuration. I just got too many errors I didn't know how to handle and there was little documentation or support online when you Googled (or DuckDuckGod or Bingd or AltaVistad) the error. The straw that broke the camel's back and forced us to switch off GCP was the inability to deploy code to production for two weeks. I have a feeling if you know what you're doing, the user-experience of using AWS vs Azure vs GCP is largely the same (though I could be wrong about this). What's frustrating is that even though I'm directly in the demographic of people these platforms want to attract, they don't focus much attention on me. We’ve since switched to Heroku and I no longer worry about making sure our site stays up and running. It’s a bit more expensive (about $125 a month for us vs $50 for Google) but I place the value of my time and mental well-being at greater than $75 a month so we’re okay with this trade-off. 3. Got a case of "shiny object syndrome" If you frequent forums or podcasts about startups I’m sure the phrase “Minimum Viable Product” (MVP) has lost all meaning to you. It’s used so commonly to describe vastly different products and product stages that it has just become another space on the board of “startup bingo”. To me, the fundamental idea of an MVP is to build the most basic version of your product to test if people will use it and to learn how to improve that product for the next version. If there is a prevailing hypothesis in this blog post it is the gap between reading and doing is the size of the Grand Canyon. Sure, I knew that v1 of what I was building should be pared down as much as possible. If you look at the original list of features we thought needed to be in this version I would say we got 90% of the way there. Still, I let a cool engineering/math challenge inflate the work I should have done. In our first version of the product my tool would whittle down thousands of engineering jobs for a given person to a list of about 30 jobs based on qualifying factors like location, job title, years of experience, etc... Then, from that list my co-founder and I would manually select 5 jobs each month that we thought were the best fit for that person. You know what we didn’t need for this version? A convoluted way to score and sort the remaining list of 40-50 jobs to save us time in choosing the top 5. I spent a lot of time coming up with a clever way to weight factors that I thought mattered to engineers in determining if a given job is what they’re looking for. As it turns out, the data we were automatically collecting on all of these jobs was not yet clean or standardized enough to make that score meaningful. We quickly scrapped this ranking system because there was no correlation between the score and the likelihood we would choose a job for a given engineer. All in, this took me about two days to develop which would have been way better spent getting our product in front of users earlier to start getting feedback. Mistakes were made - a reflection I hope that reading this will help save you time and angry typing into your computer when you launch your next project. I know I’ll continue to mess up, it’s just the nature of trying to build something new. What I want to avoid at all costs is messing up in the same way over and over. So I’ll write these posts on a semi-regular basis. I’ll also try to write about some of my successes because despite the premise of this article, things are going pretty well for us right now! We have users who really like our product and we’re solving a problem in a space we think is completely dysfunctional for job seekers. Until my next post, happy building. Previously published at https://www.beamjobs.com/blog/how-i-botched-my-companys-launch-after-leaving

Bye Bye Google: How I Botched My Company's Launch After Leaving

Did you ever imagine watching a doctor performing surgery, in real-time, on your mobile phone and that too in 3D? Don’t get confused pal, this is not Tony Stark’s laboratory. This is the power of 5G! is coming soon and according to a company working on 5G infrastructure, over of us are expected to connect to 5G by . Mobile phone applications and IoT will get affected the most by 5G and are hoped to become more powerful than ever. There is no doubt that software development companies in India are going to have a field day for years to come. 5G Ericsson, 1.5 billion 2024 , a US-based technology journalism and market data research company, wrote in its article that countries like have already started rolling out 5G networks. Sdx central South Korea, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States Talking about the world’s leading mobile phone companies that have already started delivering and working on 5G are . Also by the end of , the launch of 5G smartphones will rule the tech world with the launch of and many more. Ericsson, Samsung, Huawei, Nokia and ZTE 2020 Samsung Galaxy S10, Samsung Galaxy A90, Huwaei MateX The interesting part about 5G is that it’s not an updated version of 4G but a whole new infrastructure supporting the paradigms of 4G. This way 5G can boost the industries by bringing another Industrial Revolution. Know the predecessors Just before we jump on the impact of 5G, let’s take a look at how and where it all started. 1G (Analog): Released in mid-1980 First-generation of wireless communication Only simple calls could be made Transferable data speed was 1.9 kbit/s 2G (GPRS): Introduced in 1991 First-ever digital cellular technology Services provided were voice calls, text-only SMS messages, and internet connection facilities Transferable data speed 10 kbit/s 3G (UMTS): Introduced in 1998 Transferable data speed was between 200 kbit/s and a maximum of 14.7 Mbit/second. Smartphones also took a leap and allowed users to send and receive images and make video calls 4G (LTE): Released in 2008 Currently in use Allows gaming, video conferencing, high-definition live media streaming The transferable data rate is 60 Mbit/s Mobile apps will go upside-down! Change is the rule of life and if it is about switching to something as great as 5G then why think twice? Talk of the town, when it comes to 5G, is about its zooming speed. , the world's largest telecommunications company’s experiments have already achieved a data transferable speed of around for 5G. This means that users will be able to enjoy a video streaming experience on almost every handset. AT &T 6Gbps 4K Coming to the effects of 5G on mobile apps, there are a few things mobile apps need to do to prepare themselves for this tech-hurricane. They can consider the following possibilities of 5G and plan accordingly: Quick as a Flash: 5G has the capability to transfer files in the blink of an eye. The speed transitions can go up to leading to lesser use of internal memories and more use of cloud memories. Sending bytes of information or even streaming real-time videos in 4k is all possible after 5G is launched. So, who can work on technologies that can support cloud storage as well as zooming speeds. 15 to 20 Gbps hire app developers Boon for the world of Reality: Do you remember the game It is just a small example of augmented reality or AR. Things will get more exciting and real after the introduction of 5G. Things like AR mirrors, virtual dressing rooms and much more will become a common thing to see around. Mobile applications will start to incorporate augmented, virtual or mixed reality more in their products attracting more and more users because who wouldn’t love an app with which we can interact visually? Hey Siri! You’ve got tough competition. Pokemon? 4k and 3D are going to be a commoner: Once we will get to achieve speeds as high as 15Gbps, 3-dimensional video streaming will be a common thing. Almost every mobile application will or will have to switch to 3D to stay in the race. Video streaming apps will be more in demand because of such a rich experience. So if you are planning to learn app development technologies try to learn video implementations in the long run. Chatbots will get revived: Coming to chatbots, the biggest issue we face for now is that they are not real-time or are heavily loaded. 5G is expected to help revive them paving the way to real-time chatbots. This is possible because of the low latency of 5G. Low latency, in simple terms, is a network that is optimized to work on a high amount of data in a lesser amount of time. 5G is coming soon with this low latency network to resolve all our problems of slow internet. There is enough for all: Increased network capacity will push out the word buffering from our dictionaries. This is because the technology used in 5G is based on multiple bands of spectrum. 5G is promising extravagantly high speed. Since we have arrived at this point, why don’t we take a look at what exactly 5G will work on? 1. Millimeter-wave: These waves are broadcasted at a varying speed starting from 30 GHz to 300 GHz. While if we talk about LTE or the 4G that we are currently using is working on the highest frequency of 6 GHz. So seeing such a great leap will be fascinating for users too. 2. Small cells: Small cells, as the name suggests, are low-powered portable base stations that can be placed all over the cities. Fun-fact is that these small cells go unnoticed because their antennas are very low profile. Another cool thing that we might see in the coming time is a small cell inside every home. 3. Massive MIMO: 5G is going to increase the number of antennas as compared to 4G in order to provide a buffer-free experience. MIMO will multiply the number of antennas on a receiver and sender so as to maximize the working efficiency of 5G. 4. Beamforming: We can compare this technology to Google Maps. Similar to Gmaps, it finds the best route for the transfer of data for every individual. So now you know why 5G is so promising about its high speed. 5. Full duplex: Another technology 5G is implementing in itself is Full duplex. This means that the whole work of sending and receiving signals will be handled by a single channel. But the only drawback we think of this tech could be signal interference. Conclusion We’ve come a long way in the world of network and wireless communications. From 1G’s analog signals to 4G’s LTE we have seen it all. Soon 5G will take over all of our mobile phones and IoT devices opening a whole new world of opportunities and fun. This will all be possible because of the incredibly high speed of 5G. From sending Gbs of information in just a click to streaming 4k videos on a screen as small as our mobile phones, 5G is coming to make all this a reality. If you own a business or are planning to own one then you must be aware that you will be needing a mobile app for the promotion and working of your business. For this, you can take the help of a that works on new technologies and is already planning to work on 5G because professionals deal with things the way they should be dealt with. mobile app development company in india

5G is Here: How The Dynamics of Mobile Apps Will Change

With an approximate of over globally, the internet first blossomed into a phenomenon the world could not get enough of and has now transformed itself into a necessity, around which the core of our modern lives revolve. 4.33 billion users However, an often overlooked, yet highly essential part of connecting to the internet is the web browser. Without a web browser, even one as lousy as the Internet Explorer, getting an Uber, ordering takeout, shopping online- all of these aspects of everyday life become foreign concepts. Having said that, since the web browser is the primary medium through which connection to the internet is made possible on an arsenal of devices today, it is also an extremely popular target for cybercriminals all around   world. Perhaps the best way to put this into perspective is to consider the web browser as the window into the internet- if unsecured, it could allow malicious agents to gain valuable insight into a user’s online escapades. Although recent years have seen a rise in the awareness that internet users have about cybersecurity in general, there’s still a lot to be desired when it comes to browser security. In an attempt to contribute to the propagation of browser security, we’ve compiled an article that (hopefully) gives valuable insight into the problems associated with browsers today, and tries to answer the question of amping up . browser security The Loopholes In Our Web Browsers Although the web browser was originally created for the purpose of displaying text documents, it has catapulted into becoming a staple when it comes to accessing videos, images, and games, among the other variety of content that the internet has to offer. Unfortunately, however, despite being the primary medium through which millions of internet users gain access to their favorite content, most of the famous web browsers in use today have a variety of loopholes in them. Loopholes that leave a lot of room for exploitation of unsuspecting internet users. Another crucial, yet often overlooked element of web browser security, is the fact that most companies tend to ignore the ever-growing complexity of web browsers as a problem. As users continue to rely on their web browsers to perform several different functions and access a multitude of media content, the number of entry points for cybercriminals increases accordingly. Some of the most frequently exploited loopholes present in some of the most popular browsers today include the following: Perhaps the best known exploitable tools associated with the web browser are third-party browser plugins. Regardless of the security measures, you take to secure your browser- cybercriminals can still have a field day snooping around in your browser through vulnerabilities present in plugins. Browser Plugins: The standard procedure for gaining access to a site involves your web browser’s communication with a DNS server. The communication that takes place between a server and a website browser is a common target, with many attackers looking to intercept the browser which redirects the user to a malicious site instead, allowing for an entry point to malware. Unprotected online communication: Although a majority of the tools exploited by hackers are third-party plugins- attackers can also leverage loopholes in the browser itself, to either redirect the browser to a malicious site, or mine data. Keeping in mind the dubious nature of security associated with web browsers, it is crucial that users look for that safeguard sensitive user information, and prevent cybercriminals from mining data for malicious purposes. Browser-centric vulnerabilities: secure browsers Why Does Browser Security Matter? Keeping in mind that the previous section we’ve covered listed some of the many flaws in web browsers today, asking why browser security matters might seem redundant. However, the exploitable problems we’ve listed above are only one aspect of why browser security is not just a fancy cybersecurity gimmick. Since most hackers exploit web browsers to gain access to sensitive user information, ensuring that one’s browser has the necessary tools to protect against such breaches is of the utmost importance. Furthermore, the situation gets even more fearsome when we factor in the staggering amount of user data collected by popular browsers such as . If a hacker breaks into your browser, they gain immediate access to extremely personal insights about the life you lead, including the embarrassing google searches you made at 3 in the morning. Google Chrome Additionally, a far more perverse aspect of the collection of data is that it contributes to the victims of identity theft since the data mined from browsers is often illegally sold in the black market. 14.4 million There are also several insecure HTTP websites that use cookies and other invasive methods to surveil on a user’s online activities, which is why a key aspect of browser security is ensuring that all sites being accessed are . HTTPS Is There Any Way To Boost Browser Security? Up till this point, the state of browser security might seem like a dark and desolate valley straight out of cybersecurity hell. Although the flaws present in web browsers are serious enough to rid any cyber security-conscious individual of their sleep, there’s still a silver lining to look forward to. Unlike other cybersecurity issues, web browser security can be amped up by taking a few simple steps that can significantly harden the process that a cybercriminal has to go through to gain hijack an individual’s web browser. Right off the bat, the smallest, yet most important step a person can take on the path to improved browser security is to update to the latest version of your browser! Unless you’re using a browser from the past decade (read: Internet Explorer), most popular browsers will release frequent updates that include an arsenal of security and bug fixes. Another critical step towards greater browser security is opting for a web browser that offers additional security perks. Usually, the most important security features to be on the lookout for include anti-malware, anti-phishing plugins along with a plugin analyzer, and a sandbox, which isolates the web browser’s processes so as to minimize the impact it has on the OS. Some other steps to boost browser security include: Installing security plugins such as NoScript, HTTPS Everywhere and Flash-block. Using a VPN to encrypt online communication, which would render a user’s online activities into gibberish even if a criminal gained access to it. Employing an effective and robust firewall to prevent any external threats from attacking the operating system. Customizing browser security settings by blocking fake websites, and denying from running automatically. Additionally, users can also disable cookies, plugins, cameras, and microphones from running automatically. JavaScript So, Where Do You Go From Here? At the end of the article, we’d like to go reimburse what we said before- in the ever-evolving threat landscape of today, browser security isn’t a gimmick, it’s a necessity! In order to remain safe while browsing online, it’s crucial that users take browser security seriously, and actively employ methods, as we’ve already discussed above, to propagate security while browsing!

What Exactly Is Browser Security and Why Does It Matter So Much

Levine cited concerns over Facebook’s Ad revenue as well as ongoing regulatory risks. Facebook shares went tumbling following the news after a ‘sell’ recommendation from Michael Levine of Pivotal Research Group. Before Cambridge Analytica happened, Facebook was riding a stock market high. Source: Google News of Facebook’s privacy issues broke at the beginning of the second quarter in 2018. However, the effects of their privacy failures started being felt mid-year when their prices fell by almost 20%. It has taken almost two years for Facebook’s stock price to return to its previous high in 2018. A Brief Privacy History on Facebook Earlier in 2018, privacy concerns over Facebook’s platform had been raised, prompting Mark Zuckerberg to state their plans concerning the privacy of user data. The company, at the time, had been found guilty by German and Belgian courts for breaching the privacy laws of the jurisdictions. Facebook also admitted that it had used the system to obtain user numbers for advertising. 2 Factor Authentication These were the early signs that something potentially big could blow up if the social media giant doesn’t fix its problems. News of Cambridge Analytica then broke out at the end of Q1 in 2018, which alarmed the world. However, to tech enthusiasts, the news wasn’t as shocking. Data breaches had occurred numerous times in the past to big companies, and one could even argue that this was expected. The way user data was utilized was what made the Cambridge Analytica exposé alarming. Stock prices would be shaken following the release of the news. However, the growth trend returned for a short period before the 20% that was experienced mid-year. drop in value By March 2020, it will have been two years since the news on Cambridge Analytica broke out. Its effects are still being felt globally as companies are changing their privacy statements to meet recently implemented privacy laws. The Growth Factors Facebook’s business structure is based on advertising on its platform. It has a global reach of over 2 billion users, with 1.6 billion active daily users. The platform contains almost all demographics targeted by advertisers worldwide. Further, the digitization of the world has made social platforms ideal for advertising, which puts Facebook in a very lucrative position. The advertisement model on Facebook depends on user data. The social media giant carries out targeted advertising based on their users’ social activity, which usually represents their preferred lifestyles. With the business model, a problem arises for the company; where to draw the line when collecting user data. User data collection must be done in a way that does not infringe on any data privacy laws. Moreover, it must be done after the user has consented to their data collection. Privacy concerns have affected the business model and, thus, the revenue of Facebook. Despite the growth in numbers, more people are cautious about how they use the platform. After Cambridge Analytica, more people started taking data privacy seriously. People have become aware of the dangers of unethical data collection practices and are taking up measures on how to prevent it. Users are also facing the challenge of balancing their safety with their use of social media. Most social media users would want to continue using their social media as they have in previous years without the dangers of having their data exposed or leveraged against them. What are Existing Solutions to Facebook’s Privacy and Data Issues? There is only so much that social media platforms such as Facebook can do in terms of data privacy. Most of the Big Tech platforms are founded on centralized systems that are inherently weak and easily targeted by hackers. Centralized networks are lucrative to hackers due to the rewards they possess after being hacked. All the data is usually stored in a central server. Once hacked, hackers can have a field day with user data. However, the most dangerous entities may arguably be third-party applications given access to these social media platforms. They can easily harvest user data unbeknownst to users and, to some extent even the social media company as was the case with Facebook. Developments in technology have resulted in existing solutions that can preserve both user data, ensure the ethical collection of user data, and keep both the data market and users happy. The solutions lie in blockchain technology. Already, there are several examples of technology that can be used to make social media experience fun and safe. It must be noted that blockchain is not entirely immune to hacking. The technology, however, discourages hackers due to its method of data storage. Data is distributed among different blocks which makes it harder and unrewarding for hackers as they must gain access to many blocks before they can have any substantial data. Further, blockchain also gives users the power to decide who can have their data and to what extent their data can be used. The use of blockchain technology could easily help avert crises that have been seen before and the new ones that may arrive in the future. It’s Time for Adoption The more users become aware of their data; the more Facebook is going to realize losses. With the ongoing evolution in blockchain technology, strong consideration must be given to challenge existing data and privacy status quo’s | IBM It may be time for the world to embrace decentralization and adopt blockchain technology. This can be done gradually to ease transition from centralized networks to the safer, more secure decentralized ecosystems. Various models of adoption can be taken up with numerous blockchain companies offering blockchain adoption options. It may take some time for companies to migrate to decentralized networks fully; however, for users, they can easily migrate to already existing platforms in the blockchain ecosystem. Platforms such as and exemplify what blockchain is attempting to accomplish with social media platforms. Their existence also shows that there is a ready market appreciating these services. More users can easily get on board by simply signing up for the platforms. More decentralized social media platforms are still in development. In a few years, we may likely see decentralized platforms that either rival or are better than existing centralized platforms. Steemit Diaspora On data collection, platforms such as Instars are showing that it can be done without infringing privacy laws. The platform collects data from consenting users. Data is collected voluntarily, and there is also compensation for the data collected, another added advantage of blockchain technology. As aforementioned, it is set up to ensure that data collection in its platform is done ethically and only through permission by its users. The company also appropriately compensates its users for the data they submit on the platform. Further, Instars is always improving its services to meet the privacy demands of its ever-evolving user-base. Most blockchain platforms are designed to ensure that data producers gain from the data they submit. They eliminate any unnecessary middlemen from the data collection process. The set up ensures that profits generated from the use of user data reach the data producer. Investment options are also provided by decentralized platforms. Tokens native to these platforms can appreciate over time. Users of the platforms owning these tokens can then trade them for other tokens or money. Blockchain is on the process of making itself as enterprise-ready as possible. Various offers are available and 2020 may be the best year for enterprise adoption of the technology. Companies (as well as users) Also Benefit On data collection, there are existing blockchain platforms that offer curated data collection based on the demands of their clients. Data is collected ethically and accurately as it is provided directly from the requested target demographic by the client. Companies are assured that their advertisements get to the intended demographic. They are also assured that the data they obtain is as accurate as recorded from the primary source. With blockchain, any revenue loss loopholes are also sealed, as all records made are immutable. Facebook’s affected growth trend, and profit is a warning to the big tech companies. Most people are aware of their privacy rights and are becoming more cautious while using technology. It is only a matter of time before the decentralization migration begins, and blockchain companies start raking in higher profits. The next privacy scandal could spell doom for even the biggest players. ➕ ➕ ➕ ➕ ➕ ➕ ➕ ➕ ➕ ➕ ➕ ➕ ➕ ➕ ➕ ➕ ➕ ➕ ➕ ➕ ➕

Unliked: Facebook’s Reign Could End

In the wake of security breaches and vulnerabilities in a democratic environment, it's crucial that we build a secure online voting system. Online polls are just about everywhere - news outlets to government campaigns test the waters and engage with their audience through polls and surveys today. It’s one of the best outlets for businesses and politicians to gauge public opinion. But can you trust them? What if they fall prey to manipulation by bots - enabling the bots to submit multiple votes? It’s a critical issue that plagues the online polling industry, hampering democracy and trust. It’s alarming how simple it is to leverage robo-voting and completely sabotage an online poll and skew the results in a targeted direction. The mischief usually involves thousands of computers that come under the control of an attacker - one that can make it seem like the public views one candidate or option as the winner. Influencing opinions through phony polls Arguably the world's oldest democracy, the United States had over 200 years to get the country's election process right - but when U.S. voters go to the polls, they're turned away due to identity issues, may face long lines or even find their details missing from the electoral rolls. However, in recent years, there's an increasing number of polling sites that are embracing online voting. This move improves ease of use and accessibility for voters, but comes with inherent security vulnerabilities. Online voting systems may fall prey to hacks and security breaches, and if the right risk management measures are not in place, it would be harder to control fraudulent activities. Some security researchers also highlight that remote voters may be susceptible to security breaches than traditional voters. Let’s look at one of the online spot polls after the presidential debate, particularly the one that showed a decisive victory for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. This came at a time when most established poll channels like CNN/ORC predicted a winning night for Hillary Clinton. When the poll results were announced, media outlets remarked that the polls could have been manipulated to create a false narrative and signal the Republican’s victory to the public. In 2010, the District of Columbia's Board of Elections rolled out an experimental e-voting system for Washington D.C. In under 48 hours after the system went live, hackers took control. It’s not only democracy that takes a hit. “In 2009, users flooded the Time 100 poll to ensure that the site’s founder, Christopher Poole, made the cut. In 2012, the pranksters employed JavaScript to vote for North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Time’s annual “Person of the Year” poll and followed suit the next year with Miley Cyrus and Edward Snowden,” . a VentureBeat report highlighted What’s interesting is that with ample programming scripts to support them, bots enjoy a field day with online polls. Five years ago, in an effort to avoid being hacked again, Time switched their online poll platform to Poptip, which required users to log in with their social media accounts to vote. However, it took two programmers only an hour to develop Ruby and C# scripts that permitted them to register a vote on behalf of any social media user without their knowledge. Bad actors have several methods to corrupt polls - from deploying proxy servers to hide IP addresses and resubmitting forms to using bulk email addresses created solely for the poll. Here’s a video that shows how a regular online poll can be manipulated. The need for a more secure, identity-based security The issue surrounding democracy around online polls surfaced recently when - highlighting the critical need for identity-based security. Passbase hacked Hacker Noon’s “Most Exciting Startup” award and won Like several online polls, Hacker Noon’s award recorded votes based on browser sessions and did not require the user to complete any identification or verification processes. Without securely and accurately or in this case, an individual casting a vote, how can we trust an online poll or an election? And specifically, how would we know that the person we are interacting with online is indeed who they say they are? We used tools to manipulate the results of the awards - not to win, but to make a point on what this means for online polls in a democratic space, and what we can do about it. verifying the true identity of a user What this showed was that users (and bots) had the ability to damage the integrity of democracy and reflected a larger set of issues the digital world needed to tackle. The Passbase hack showed the impact fake identities can have - and what enterprises and institutions can do to avoid manipulation in online polls. The digital space thrives on trust and security and when this is compromised, it shows that we need a more robust system for digital . identity verification Enterprises and institutions must be able to ensure that online voting is not only a seamless process, but also secure and accurate. A transparent, clean election would be one that has a robust system for identifying and authenticating voters, while also detecting and preventing fraud. The various methods that are deployed by threat actors to manipulate polls can be completely avoided if the right steps are taken to authenticate the genuineness of the participating users and verify their identities. “There are techniques and tools to detect devices and prevent bots from accessing their sites,” Rami Essaid, CEO and Co-founder of Distil Networks . said "Companies should challenge the bot to prove that it is a human, using various puzzles, and use machine learning to determine if it is a real user. All of this should happen in real-time before the bot gains access to the site," he said. Industry experts in the threat intelligence space stress that polling organizations will need to invest in robust cyber security and digital identity solutions to build credibility and security into the system. And it’s not just for compliance - but to effectively manage the overall top-to-bottom risk exposure of an organization. “The self-deception of most defenders is, ‘I'm not important enough to be attacked in that way,’ or ‘I can't afford the investment it would take to defend against that,’ or ‘internet security is not my primary business and I refuse to make it a first-tier cost.’ Those are just differing ways to lose," . highlights Paul Vixie As we look to the future, several processes continue to and will be moving to online platforms. Be it polling, fintech, services and products in the shared economy, or mobility, a secure process for plays a critical role. With multiple and hacks, fake digital identities and stolen credentials can impact an and reputation. digital identity verification data breaches organization’s security However, processes that prevent fraudulent activities may be invasive and cumbersome, particularly for the consumer. platforms such as Passbase aim to tackle this by enabling a highly secure and seamless process for organizations to . Digital identity verification verify their users’ identity The process is simple - the platform uses NIST-certified and liveness detection to ensure that the user is a genuine, live individual and verifies this against data captured from government-issued or official IDs. The developer-friendly tool can be implemented with a few lines of code and the entire verification process is completed in a few seconds. facial recognition technology “Companies gain access to users’ information in a secure enclave, and avoid the dangers of getting hacked and leaking sensitive information,” , CEO and co-founder of Passbase, told TechCrunch earlier this year. Mathias Klenk Supported by a zero-knowledge sharing architecture, takes a more by giving users control over what data to share and who to share it with. To learn more, . Passbase’s identity verification platform privacy-centered approach schedule a live demo Security and trust are essential when it comes to elections. Voters have to trust the process and election results, and feel secure that their right to privacy will be protected. Technology in the voting system can result in multiple benefits. For example, and automating user verification will enable a larger set of voters to exercise their rights electronically, and ensure that each vote is counted using biometric data. This begins with establishing a , where the identities of voters are verified and registered before casting their votes. biometric technology secure digital identity system The future of voting is digital. What will be crucial to securing this will be our ability to identify voters and mitigate risk effectively.

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