Markets Analyst Pits

Bitcoin and Ethereum With

Peak Amazon’s 6000% Growth

 

    

Since Internet stocks, including Amazon.com Inc.

in the dot-com era, bitcoin and cryptocurrencies could be the most lucrative trading opportunities. Everyone knows that trading cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, comes at a high risk for many reasons, such as volatility. However, it is a real opportunity for both traders and investors right now.However, investors should be careful when investing in bitcoin in the longer term. Since the birth of the cryptocurrency, bitcoin owners experienced great price drops, with some of them reaching 75 percent of previous peak values. Recently in June, bitcoin, along with the other cryptocurrencies, experienced a huge price fall of nearly 40 percent before bottoming out.

Looking behind all cryptocurrencies, both investors and traders should see the bigger picture since virtual currencies are the start of something grand. The reason for this is the blockchain technology behind all of the digital currencies. Since the super useful attribute of blockchain, which enables value transfer without middlemen, many companies, and financial institutes are planning to implement the new tech. According to Gordon Scott, contributor at Investopedia, who is also the Managing Director of the CMT program for the Market Technicians Association, the recent price surge of bitcoin’s price “is an indication that many more people are starting to believe these promises could actually be fulfilled.”

If bitcoin seems to be too fast for many, investors should look back to the dot-com crash in 2000, where many of the Internet stocks crashed, many were lowered in value but managed to recover, while some of the stocks rocketed to orbit and stayed there, such as Amazon and eBay.According to Scott, there is a worthwhile comparison between the prices of Amazon and bitcoin. Amazon, between the period of 1997 and 1999 increased its value by 6,000 percent. On the other hand, bitcoin’s price rose by 4,000 percent from 2009 to 2010 and further increased by 2800 percent from 2016 to 2017. Ethereum also experienced big price surges: the value of the cryptocurrency increased by 2,800 percent from 2016 to 2017.

At first, most of the people knew that Amazon had a great idea, however, no one could quantify the share value of the company accurately. Investors had to guess the value of the firm, which resulted in overestimating the possibilities for a time. The peak price from 1999 looks really cheap by comparison today. Surprisingly, bitcoin’s performance in the cryptocurrency’s first two years only achieved approximately two-thirds of Amazon’s price increase. The past two years in both bitcoin’s and Ethereum’s life came with the most dramatic price surges, however, it was not enough to reach Amazon’s meteoric rise.

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about -Bitcoin.

Markets Analyst Pits Bitcoin and Ethereum With Peak Amazon's 6000% Growth

South Korean Firm Pays $1 Million in Bitcoin Ransom to Regain Data

    

A South Korean web hosting company is paying over USD $1 million

in bitcoin to extortionists to put an end to a ransomware crisis affecting nearly 3,500 customers. In what is seen as the biggest publicly-known payout to date, South Korean web hosting firm Nayana is paying out a total of 397.6 BTC (approx. $1.05 million at press time) to the attacker in order to recover the data of websites belonging to over 3,400 customers, most of whom are small business customers.

The ransomware, titled Erebus, infected a total of 153 Linux servers along with customers’ websites. According to Trend Micro, the ransomware strain is capable of infecting up to 433 file types including office documents, databases, archives and multimedia files. Closer analysis by researchers revealed the ransomware to be specifically coded toward targeting and encrypting web servers and their data. In a notice posted on June 12, Nayana revealed details of the original ransom note which demanded an unprecedented 550 bitcoins ($1.6 million at the time). “My boss tell me, your buy many machine, give you good price, 550 BTC. If you do not have enough money, you need make a loan,” wrote the extortionist in his original communication.

The demand and the ensuing threat read:

“You company have 40+ employees, every employees’s annual salary $30,000 all employees 30,000*40 = $1,200,000 all server 550BTC = $1,620,000   If you can’t pay that, you should go bankrupt. But you need to face your childs, wife, customers and employees. Also your will lost your reputation, business. You will get many more lawsuits.”  On June 14, Nayana posted an update, revealing CEO Hwang Chil-hong’s negotiations with the hackers. The executive revealed he was facing financial ruin and negotiated the ransom sum down to 397.6 BTC, to be paid in three installments. So far, two payments have been paid already.

Trend Micro researchers point to Nayana’s use of outdated systems – a 2008 Linux kernel, Apache and PHP versions from 2006 as factors behind the ransomware exploit. “It’s worth noting that this ransomware is limited in terms of coverage, and is, in fact, heavily concentrated in South Korea,” researchers wrote. Nayana’s most recent update from June 20 (Tuesday) reveals that a currently-running decryption program will take about 2-5 days to recover customer files, while some servers are expected to take over 10 days. The third payment is expected to be made today, Wednesday, upon receiving an additional decryption key.

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept

Contributor

Please click either Link to Learn more about -Bitcoin.

South Korean Firm Pays $1 Million in Bitcoin Ransom to Regain Data

The Fundamentals for a Successful Inbound-Marketing Strategy

    

An entrepreneur’s responsibilities reach far and wide. 

You wear a number of hats on a day-to-day basis, none more important than marketing. To succeed, you must learn the strategies and practices that work best in 2014. A deep understanding of inbound marketing best practices is vital to the growth and success of your business. No matter how busy you are, you simply can't ignore the importance of marketing your brand effectively. Take a look at the eight most important things every entrepreneur needs to know about inbound marketing.

The traditional marketing playbook is broken. 

Almost everyone – 91 percent, to be precise – has unsubscribed from email lists. Two-out-of-three people (68 percent) who record TV content do so to skip advertisements (Motorola, December 2012) and, according to DoubleClick, the average click-through rate on display ads is only 0.2 percent. According to Brian Halligan, the CEO of Hubspot and author of the book Inbound Marketing: Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers Online, the way modern consumers shop and make purchases has changed dramatically, and as such, businesses must adapt in order to survive.

In an interview, Halligan said, “The Internet has fundamentally changed how we live our lives, and as consumers, we now have more options than ever to tune out marketing that is annoying. Most entrepreneurs I know understand that based on their own experience, but when it comes to marketing their business, they default to the traditional marketing playbook because it's easy or because it's what everyone has always done for years. That's a huge mistake."

According to Halligan, you can no longer rent your way to consumer attention, you need to earn it. Instead of dreaming up new ways to interrupt your way into your prospects’ lives, invest in ways to engage them meaningfully with an inbound experience. “Dharmesh (Shah) and I wrote the inbound marketing book to give entrepreneurs actionable advice to attract, engage and delight their prospects, customers and leads,” Halligan explained. "Inbound marketing focuses on the width of your brain, not the width of your wallet, and entrepreneurs have more remarkable ideas than anyone I know."

Your content must be remarkable enough to break through the clutter. 

Think about how many channels you have on your television, and how many websites and social media channels compete for your attention each day. The same is true for your customers. It’s not enough to just produce content. Your content must educate, inspire or entertain your audience. Don’t talk about your brand non-stop or try to sell people too early or often in your content. Instead, try to spark interesting dialogue and discussion with your content. Doing so will pay off with attention and engagement.

Think of your website as a hub, not a megaphone.

Far too many businesses think about their websites as broadcast channels for addressing a large group of people. Your website functions best when its content and design are built with a human touch. Instead of writing copy to impress your competitors, create copy and experiences an individual customer will love. Don’t scream through a megaphone at your customers. Design the entire end-to-end experience with individual humans in mind. Conversation trumps a broadcast message every time. Design your web experience accordingly.

Inbound includes content and code.

 Many entrepreneurs mistake massive volumes of content for an inbound strategy, forgetting that shipping code is indispensable as well. Specifically, free tools are powerful in converting web traffic into highly engaged leads. For example, InsightSquared created Sales Funnel, a free tool that allows Salesforce users to quickly and efficiently diagnose their sales funnel. Leads that try Sales Funnel convert at a rate almost twenty times higher than leads that don’t. Free tools can transform your entire customer experience. Invest developer resources into your marketing efforts for the biggest impact possible.

Master the call to action. 

Think about how hard you work to get traffic to your site. Now think of what happens if a visitor comes to your site and doesn’t know where to go or what to do next once they visit. You’ve just wasted all of your hard efforts! Your call to action is a sign post showing your visitors where they should go next. If someone came to your blog first, you want to make it easy and seamless for them to subscribe to read similar articles. If a visitor comes from a co-marketing initiative with a partner, ensure the copy on the site is built specifically to appeal to someone who knows both your brands. Tailor the next step accordingly. It’s not enough to optimize your site for search. You have to optimize your site for action.

Get visual. 

The average attention span is just eight seconds, so even if you want to write a 10,000-word essay on your new product launch, chances are slim that your audience will get through it. Creating remarkable visual content is a great way to cut through content clutter and stand out from the pack. If you don’t have an army of designers at your disposal, use Canva or Visage to create simple and beautiful visuals, hire a young freelancer to pitch in or just put your iPhone to good use taking pictures of your space, your customers, your team and your product. When it comes to content, a photo (or video) really is worth 1,000 words.

Inbound delivers higher ROI for your business. 

In a 2013 survey, American inbound marketers spending more than $25,000 per year saved an average of 13 percent in overall cost per lead ($36 versus $41 with outbound). It’s far more expensive to continue pouring money into paid channels that don’t deliver returns than it is to invest in blogging and social media. Inbound marketing is good for your bottom line and your brand.

Hire wisely.

If you’re hiring an in-house marketer or an agency to help with your marketing efforts, you need a skill set that matches your strategy. Invest in people who are digitally savvy, highly analytical, have significant reach on the web and have experience creating remarkable content. Today’s marketing world requires companies to continually optimize. The team behind you must be well equipped, comfortable with the technology and have the tenacity to update your strategy and approach on a daily basis to meet your growth goals. Successful inbound marketing is a science that requires a specific expertise and plenty of experience. Even if marketing isn’t your cup of tea, it’s important that you know and understand the basics. If you keep these tips in mind, you can rest assured that your business is practicing the latest and greatest inbound marketing techniques, and maximizing its growth potential.

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept

Contributor

Please click either Link to Learn more about -Inbound Marketing.

The Fundamentals for a Successful Inbound-Marketing Strategy

Blockchain Comes to East London With Colu Local Currency Launch

Blockchain Comes to East London With Colu Local Currency Launch

    

A new cryptocurrency is coming to east London.

Launched by Israel-based blockchain startup Colu, the 'Local Pound, East London' currency is now available for area consumers and small businesses who want to boost the local economy. The digital currency is tied one-to-one to the national currency, the British pound, and can be bought with cards and bank accounts. According to Colu co-founder and vice president, Mark Smargon, Colu's currencies are an attempt to combat the threat of retail chains in cities and neighborhoods, while the accompanying app is meant to help businesses manage their transactions and help locals discover merchants in their area. In this context, the startup's local digital currencies are trying to remove technical barriers for local businesses when it comes to paperless transactions.

Smargon told CoinDesk:

"The local businesses are not really interacting with blockchain knowingly. The idea of selling blockchain to consumers and small businesses is not something we are doing."

The company has launched services in Liverpool and Tel Aviv, where it also has its operations. The Liverpool currency, which went live in late 2016, has around 16,000 users and merchants on the network.

Future ambitions

Going forward, Colu plans to build out more features as the communities around the local currencies grow. "We started on a very small scale, on a neighborhood scale, and right now we're working on a city scale," said Smargon. "We merged all of our communities in Tel Aviv into one big Tel Aviv coin." One possible feature in the pipeline is allowing Colu local currencies to be interchangeable with more widely known cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin and ether. Though, Smargon said this could be some way off. "Right now, we're not focusing on opening new economies but building the retention," he said, adding that its various currencies have about 50,000 users and carried out $1m worth of transactions. The company is now in the process of applying for an e-money license in the UK to bolster its digital currency development.

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept

Contributor

Please click either Link to Learn more about -Bitcoin.

Blockchain Comes to East London With Colu Local Currency Launch

Vitalik Buterin Confirms Ethereum’s Proof of Stake 75 Percent Complete

  

At the Taipei Ethereum Meetup,

Vitalik Buterin, one of the co-founders and lead developers of Ethereum, revealed that the development of a proof of stake protocol for the Ethereum network is 75 percent complete. Prior to the announcement of Buterin, in a recent interview, Ethereum Foundation member and Ethereum co-founder Hudson Jameson released the foundation’s official roadmap for Ethereum development in 2017. The roadmap included the foundation’s plans of releasing the next version of Ethereum called Metropolis in three to six months and following that update with a switch of consensus protocol from proof of work to proof of stake.

Vitalik Buterin reaffirmed the Ethereum development roadmap laid out by Jameson and emphasized that Ethereum will most likely switch to a proof of stake protocol by the end of 2017. At the Taipei Ethereum Meetup, a community of over 500 members that focuses on the discussion of Ethereum and blockchain innovation,

Buterin stated:

“We are working on a daemon that actually interacts with a Casper [smart] contract and sends transactions to it. That is the first part. The second stage is that we will write clients that are aware of Casper contracts.”

In regard to the development of Casper, Buterin stated that it is over three quarters completed.

What is Casper & Proof of Stake

Since 2015, Ethereum developers actively have dug into the development of Casper and a proof of stake (PoS) protocol. PoS and proof of work (PoW) are consensus protocols that allow stakeholders or miners to come to an agreement on various issues and verify transactions on the blockchain. For instance, if the Bitcoin network is to agree upon a hard fork, miners have to signal their hash power to approve the fork. Also, in a proof of work protocol, miners have to allocate their hash power to verify and confirm transactions.

PoS is different in the way that it considers stakeholders as the majority and it does not utilize the hash power of miners to verify or confirm transactions. In a PoS protocol, miners do not exist. The largest stakeholders in the network are forced to play by the rules and verify transactions. Ultimately, the economic issue of switching to Casper or a PoS protocol comes down to the incentives for stakeholders. How stakeholders are incentivized or benefited for verifying and confirming Ethereum transactions.

The Ethereum Foundation and Buterin’s perception of a PoS system is that everyone within the protocol is technically a miner and therefore unless they choose to lose their stake of Ether by playing against the rules, every user will verify and confirm transactions in a fair manner. Essentially, the foundation and its developers believe this is the ultimate decentralized governance system that increases participation of stakeholders of the network.

In an interview on January 18, Buterin stated that once completed, Casper will be tested across all seven clients of Ethereum in a testnet. If the testnet experiment of Casper is successful, developers intend to move it to production and release its final code by this year. Currently, various blockchains including NXT, BitShares, and Peercoin operate on the PoS protocol. Some utilize a hybrid system between PoW and PoS to optimize their networks’ efficiency.

However, despite the success of the aforementioned blockchain networks, leading blockchain company and mining firm BitFury noted in its whitepaper that a PoS protocol is vulnerable to a wide range of attacks such as long-range attack, bribe attack, Coin Age accumulation attack and precomputing attack that could result as long-term issues for the network.

“Currently, there are several digital currencies implementing some form of proof of stake consensus including Peercoin, Nxt, Novacoin, BlackCoin, and BitShares. However, pure proof of stake approaches pose substantial security threats that cannot be recreated in proof of work systems (including Bitcoin). These problems are inherent to proof of stake algorithms, as proof of stake consensus is not anchored in the physical world (cf. with hashing equipment in proof of work),” BitFury’s white paper.

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept

Contributor

Please click either Link to Learn more about -Bitcoin.

Vitalik Buterin Confirms Ethereum's Proof of Stake 75 Percent Complete

Blockchain Startup Everledger
Partners with Singapore Diamond Exchange and Kynetix

   

Everledger, the London-based startup that uses the blockchain

to securely store data and provide provenance for high-value physical assets such as diamonds and artwork, has entered into a partnership with the Singapore Diamond Investment Exchange (SDiX) and physical commodity markets expert Kynetix. The Singapore Diamond Investment Exchange (SDiX) is the world’s first commodity exchange in physically settled diamonds. The exchange is also the first fully electronic self-regulated marketplace for traders and accredited investors powered by real-time transaction data. The exchange revealed the new partnership through a press release on June 15.

Kynetix is a leading physical commodity digitization expert that has developed a platform called Sentinel that allows commodity exchanges and trading companies to meet the challenges associated with compliance, automation, risk and revenue generation. Sentinel’s sophisticated post-trade software powers quick processing time for large-scale physical deliveries. The three companies have successfully concluded the first part of its proof-of-concept for a blockchain-based authentication and record-keeping service for trading diamonds on a global commodity exchange.

Everledger’s blockchain technology will be used to verify the ownership and authenticity of the diamonds, which will be queried through Kynetix’s Sentinel market infrastructure platform. This will enable owners of diamonds with certificates of ownership from third party verification laboratories to ascertain the history and confirm ownership of their asset.

The head of Business Development at Kynetix, Guillaume Kendall said: “In line with our mission to build total trust in physical commodities, we believe this innovative integration of our Sentinel platform with blockchain is yet another step towards reducing the risks associated with trading and financing commodities globally.“ Once a trade happens on SDiX, the changes in the ownership of the diamond will be automatically recorded on the blockchain, which ensures proof of ownership is securely recorded due to the blockchain’s immutable nature. This record is then made easily available to all relevant market participants.

Everledger founder and CEO Leanne Kemp said: “It was a pure technical delight to integrate with Kynetix, a powerful combination of technology and purpose entwined. We are pleased to provide the market-leading blockchain infrastructure that is key to SDiX’s verification, and data archiving services and look forward to working industriously with the market on creating purposeful tooling to enable safe and fast trading in physical diamonds.”

The service was able to verify the details of a consigned diamond basket on SDiX consisting of Gemological Institute of America (GIA) certified stones using the data points that are used by Everledger in its provenance process. The solution was able to output a “view receipt” of the digital certificate for each stone in the basket, housed on the blockchain, proving its efficiency.

The CEO of the Singapore Diamond Investment Exchange Linus Koh, said: “This exciting collaboration builds on SDiX’s record of delivering advanced technologies to enable a trusted, fair and transparent marketplace for trading diamonds as an investable asset class. This new concept draws on blockchain’s distributed ledger capability to demonstrate how we can further instill confidence and convenience for the benefit of diamond investors and financiers.” This new system is expected to be applicable as a solution to a wide range of diamond market challenges such as enhancing provenance data, increasing the security and efficiency of the supply chain, as well as helping to develop new risk management tools.

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept

Contributor

Please click either Link to Learn more about -Bitcoin.

Blockchain Startup Everledger Partners with Singapore Diamond Exchange and Kynetix

Top Most Hyped Up Cryptocurrencies Right Now

    

                             It is apparent there is a lot of excitement in the world

of alternative cryptocurrencies. Plenty of coins are seeing significant value increases, although not all of them will have a place in the mainstream world. Below are some of the altcoins gaining a lot of value as their mainstream potential continues to grow.

Augur

Every cryptocurrency enthusiast will have heard of the Augur project. By creating a decentralized prediction market where users can wager on any event taking place at any given time, Augur sees a lot of merit in using the wisdom of the crowd. The platform will be powered with REP tokens, which have seen a fair value increase these past few days. About a week ago, the value per REP was US$5.35, which has now increased to US$10.16. Keeping in mind how there are only 11 million tokens, this value could go up even further in the coming months. Then again, investing in Augur should not be done for short-term gains by any means.

Factom

Even though the Factom project is quite intriguing, a lot of people tend to overlook the platform’s native token. Factom stores records on the blockchain and anchors them to the Bitcoin ledger. It appears people are finally realizing the potential Factom holds, as its native token’s value has increased from US$2.63 to US$4.41 in just seven days. Impressive momentum for a somewhat undervalued project.

Dash

The rise of Dash‘s value cannot be ignored by anyone in the world of cryptocurrency. Even a DDoS attack against a few hundred masternodes could not disrupt this price increase by any means. Even though Dash’s value is retracing a bit after a steep rise, things are still looking quite positive. Over the course of one month, Dash’s value has gone from just over US$21 all the way to US$90. It even surpassed US$100 yesterday, but the price momentum could not be sustained for long.

Monero

Some people will gladly tell you a Monero price increase had to happen sooner or later. Anonymity-centric cryptocurrencies always tend to do well, and several darknet markets have shown interest in Monero as well. Things are looking very good for Monero these past few days, with a value increase from US$12.45 per XMR all the way to US$22 in a week’s time. It is interesting to see Dash and Monero experience growth around the same time.

Ethereum

People who are not glued to the exchange charts right now may have missed out on Ethereum‘s meteoric rise these past few days. Right now, one ETH is worth US$40.98, up from US$18.75 a week ago. Interestingly enough, Ethereum Classic saw its value increase as well, from US$1.33 to US$2.02. Although some people argue these coins are still one and the same ecosystem, there are some major differences between them. In the end, both coins’ market cap is increasing at the same time. Most intriguing indeed.

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept

Contributor

Please click either Link to Learn more about -Bitcoin.

Top Most Hyped Up Cryptocurrencies Right Now