Metacoin

Covering Bitcoin, the Blockchain, Altcoins, and Fintech

Archives for November 2017

My Morning Bitcoin Ritual

There’s a certain power to morning rituals, to routines, and to doing the same thing every day – you find yourself ready for a variety of challenges, and, if you’re a morning person like me, you can hit the ground running by 8:30, with your priority list or to do list on the road to being conquered.

Crypto The UnicornIf you’ve followed any of the self-help gurus on the internet over the past ten years or so, you know there is almost a cottage industry built around productivity. So take these with a grain of salt…what works for me may not work for you.

In any event, here’s the ritual I follow, with the specific crypto mantra that has helped me in the past eight months.

Before you ask “who are you and why should we listen to you?” – let’s just say that I’m pretty happy with the little crypto empire I’m starting to build. But I have a lot to learn…which is why you’ll see a good chunk of this devoted to research.

Step One: Fire Up a Specific Set of Sites

I have the following sites set to open up on Chrome:

  • Gmail
  • Google Finance
  • Metacoin – yes, this site is one of the first things I check, to get statistics, read any comments, etc.
  • Twitter – where, in addition to the Team Metacoin account, I spend most of my time tweeting under my Area 224 account, where I have tweeted for close to ten years.
  • Poloniex (more on that in a moment)
  • CoinMarketCap (which gets ripped on by quite a few people, I know…as it appears they really don’t vet their ads very well)
  • LinkedIn (checking in on professional network stuff there)
  • ESPN (well, duh), and
  • POW Token – as I’m semi-obsessed with this one getting off the ground. That’s an AFFILIATE LINK over there. Use it and I get some bonus tokens, but, if this one gets to a penny a token in the next year, they’re handing you a few hundred dollars.

Step Two: Open Up Your Spreadsheet(s)

You of course have a system for charting your holdings – I use Excel, but there are scores of ways to keep track of what you hold and that’s okay.

In my case, though, my Excel systems have helped me to chart everything that’s important in crypto:

  • What I hold
  • What I paid for it
  • What I sold it for
  • What revenue has been realized from any Passive Income Programs (PIPs).

YOU HAVE TO HAVE THIS INFORMATION FOR TAX PURPOSES. IT IS PART OF YOUR RESPONSIBILITY.

I’m an American: I’m not going to get into a debate here on taxation and cryptocurrency – and, as always, we have advised you to get professional help from an accountant and tax advisor. Don’t take this responsibility lightly – if you want the RIGHT to get into cryptocurrency, you have the responsibility to pay your taxes and do everything that is legally required of you. Soapbox speech over.

Step Three: Go Line By Line

Here’s where I go down the list and track where my investments are. The ones that aren’t PIPs can be tracked by a combo of Poloniex and CoinMarketCap.

My holdings might change, but my HODLings aren’t changing very often. Here’s a list of the ones that I track currently:

  • Bitcoin
  • Ethereum
  • Ripple
  • Litecoin
  • NEO
  • Walton
  • ChainLink
  • COSS (to buy this one, you need to go to coss.io).

Weekly or so, I update the BRED Portfolio – I’ll tweet results and sometimes update the blog, too.

Next, I check the PIPs that I’m currently involved with. Note that this list is MUCH SHORTER than it used to be:

  • Bitconnect. That’s an AFFILIATE LINK; however, I’ve begun divesting from my holdings there, using a three-step process to take profits. Instead of reinvesting daily profits, I’m (1) taking them in Bitconnect coins, (2) trading them for BTC, and (3) moving that BTC to another wallet.
  • Hexabot. We talked about this on the blog and had our AFFILIATE LINK REMOVED ON DECEMBER 5.
  • Chain.group. Another one I just heard about, and I have a small stake. Another AFFILIATE LINK.

I track all of my results in the main spreadsheet, and keep track of my total once per day – any more than that and you’re gonna drive yourself nuts.

One thing that I include on my spreadsheet is my tally on BTC Heat – which, yes, is a BTC game. Use that link to get started and it helps me grow my number of spins.

I mentioned POW Token above (still time to get yours with this AFFILIATE LINK) and one other thing that I’ve done to add to my stake is “validate” users. This can be an investment of a half hour or so; but, lately, they’re slowing down how many new users they bring in, so there has been less validation to be done.

I also check the price of POW on EtherDelta; if there’s more of a pullback or I’m feeling frisky, I’ll grab a few more for cheap.

Step Four: Twitter & Research

These two, believe it or not, can go hand in hand. That’s right: “Crypto Twitter” is great, and you can get great ideas about what coins you might want to research. Take it ALL with a grain of salt – you’re not going to get rich just because one random person tweets a coin’s cashtag and tells you it will “moon.”

People that I follow:

  • Sherlock – this guy is good, clever, and on the cutting edge with quite a few trades
  • Bambou Club – somewhere near the Adriatic; he’s also active on Medium with a periodic update on what’s going on in his world
  • Notsofast – trader, miner, lover of altcoins (though he uses a different word for them)
  • Tiffany Hayden – knows XRP backwards and forwards, but shares info about the tech side, too.

I could go on (and reserve the right to update this list down the road) but the point is that you pick a few people that share cool stuff and start hearing what they have to say. And, in my case, that means researching coins and platforms they are talking about.

Try to use a “10th Man” approach, too – if you see quite a few people talking about how great a coin is, or how this next ICO will make people rich overnight, figure out what could possibly go wrong with it. You might end up talking yourself out of making a semi-foolish investment.

A Note on YouTube

Right now, I can’t recommend any YouTubers that talk crypto. Why? My feed seems to be dominated by certain people who talk incessantly about their favorite passive income platform – it’s getting old, getting annoying, and extremely one-dimensional.

I’ll make more videos of my own in the future, but I actually want to add value when I do so – not just talk about my own multi-level marketing abilities.

AND…You Can Do All This In 30 Minutes!

That’s right, whether crypto is your day job or just a side hustle, you really only need to spend 30 minutes on this exercise. It will put you in the right frame of mind and get you ready to build your crypto fortune.

Go get ’em!

 

 

 

Metacoin Q&A – Simon Wajcenberg from POW Token

Time for another Q&A – this one featuring Simon Wajcenberg, one of the founders of the POW Token. We’ve been intrigued from the get-go – so we thought we’d ask a few questions of Simon. (We’re including our referral link throughout – we’re compensated with POW tokens if you use the link to sign up.)

Q: You launched on October 3 and had one of the more compelling value propositions: you were giving away the token to anyone and everyone, they just needed a Facebook account that wasn’t brand new. Why take that approach?

A: We believe that Ethereum will be part of the widespread adoption of Blockchain throughout the planet. Right now, the UI for decentralised Apps and services are pretty horrible. You’ve got to be a real believer (we are!) in order to persist and actually use a decentralised App or service. This will takes years of development by the crypto community until the UI is as easy as that which we expect on mass market web applications. In the mean time, we believe the only way to get mass market adoption is to build a bridge between the centralised “old world” and the decentralised “new world”. POWtoken hopes it is that bridge!

Q: Were you surprised by the initial reaction? (I mean, the servers couldn’t handle it at first…)

A: No – if anything we were slightly disappointed by the lack of PR for the launch. We really believe when the project takes off, we’ll be looking at hundreds of thousands of claims each day.

Because we had so little PR at the launch, we decided to cancel our AWS (Amazon) servers and stick with a cheaper, less scalable server hosting service. Yes this meant that the server could not handle the spike at the time of the launch, but within 30 mins we were back down to levels where the server had 90% spare capacity again. The whole project is done on a shoestring – we are not raising any money, and none of the team get paid in any form. We are all POW holders, just like everybody else who has claimed. We were careful to only give the founder team a collective 6.5% of the POW, to align our interests with all the other users. When the server utilisation starts to approach 75% utilisation we’ll start planning for AWS migration – we are still a way off that!

Q: You make the case on the site that each user of Bitcoin could have an implied value of in excess of $10,000. Care to elaborate on what that could mean for users of POW?

A: Much of the per user value in Bitcoin reflects expectations for the number of Bitcoin users growing to billions from their current level of possibly just over 10 million users. As the number of users approaches 1bn, the per user valuation should fall. Let’s assume it falls to just $200 a head – we’ll use the figure again below.

Our allocation structure accommodates 1bn claimers. We want the Twitter and Facebook users of the world to come and claim their POW allocation and to get their friends to as well.

So let’s look at the numbers. If we got to 1bn users, we would have a total supply of POW of 231b. If we assume the market cap of POWtoken.com at that point was $200b (1bn * $200), then the price of 1 POW would be 0.86 USD. That means the lucky person who got 10bn POW on 3rd October (the first claimant) would be worth over $8bn USD! The current free POW allocation is over 70,000 POW’lite’, and the referral scheme means you can earn another 70K for every person you refer who joins. It really is an extraordinary opportunity for us all to work together to increase adoption and share the benefit. *Editor’s note: as of this writing, 15 November, users claim 73,000 or so POW”lite.” This figure will continue to decrease.

Q: In the interest of full disclosure, not only am I using my referral link to earn more tokens, I’m also a “validator.” Can you please walk us through why that’s important work to be done?

POW LiteA: In the first few weeks we had quite a lot of accounts claiming that clearly had been created on Facebook purely to claim POW’lite’ This was against our Terms and Conditions. Our initial plan had been to use parameters from Facebook’s OAuth “Sign in With Facebook” toolkit to establish the creation date of each Facebook account and hence only allow accounts that had been created for at least 3 months to make a claim. At the time we were unaware that Facebook do not allow this, and do not allow work-arounds such as using the earliest post in the user’s timeline to estimate the creation date. We are in Facebook’s debt for allowing us to take advantage of their amazing OAuth technology, and want to be very careful to respect the letter and spirit of their guidelines. For that reason, we had to come up with an alternative, which is what the validation step does. We ask our existing users to take a look at the public profile page on Facebook of each new claimant, and determine if the account was created before a specific date. Every fake account that is avoided, saves a significant amount of POW, and enhances value for everybody in the network.

Q: As a validator, I’ve noticed quite a few users from Asian countries. Is there any part of the world that you’d like to see more traction for the coin?

A: POW is very popular in the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia. We are seeing increasing take up in South America (Venezuela and Brazil are hotspots). In the African continent, Nigeria is the leading edge. It’s exciting to see claims from such far flung communities as Greenland and the Cook Islands.

Q: How are things coming along with respect to the other milestones, such as Twitter users being able to send POW back and forth, or when the tokens can be traded on exchanges (beyond the EtherDelta ERC20 tokens that we can trade now)?

A: Twitter users sending to each other – within next 7 days

Twitter users and Facebook users sending to each other – within next 14 days

Extended Twitter referral scheme (sending POW to followers who are not POWtoken.com users) – within next 14 days

Twitter ‘TipBot’ – allowing Twitter users to “tip” each other POW’lite’ – within next 21 days

Bridge between POWtoken.com and Ethereum Blockchain – complete by end December.

Q: Any final thoughts for POW Token users and the future of the coin?

Let’s work together to increase crypto adoption. Any ideas you think can help, please get in touch via our social media channels – we are listeners!

Editor’s Note: You can find them on Twitter – and yes, they’re responsive folks. Thanks to Simon and the team for weighing in!

Coinreum, Hexabot, and Bitconnect – Updates on Three Passive Income Platforms

Well, after an active weekend of craziness around Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, we thought we’d instead focus on Passive Income Platforms that we’ve talked about on the site quite a bit. Today, a brief post about three of them – two new, one not-so-new – and the future of these PIPs.

It’s also time for our regular warning: while we’re happy to experiment on these sites, don’t “invest” more than you can afford to lose. If you send Bitcoin or any other coin to a site with the promise of real huge returns, caution should rule the day. To us, $50 or so worth of Bitcoin or Ethereum or another coin is a fine starting point – and we consider that money gone the second it is sent. (This also keeps us from sending large amounts: it’s going into a black hole.)

With that aside, here’s our take on three such platforms: Coinreum, Hexabot, and Bitconnect.

Coinreum – AVOID. DON’T INVEST.

We’ve pulled the ads for Coinreum, and won’t put them back up. Why?

Well, while it appears to be legit – if you judge its semi-ubiquitous ad campaigns as signs of legitimacy – it has all the signs of the other scams we’ve witnessed:

  • Pretty audacious returns in a short time (total cumulative returns of 150% on up for just a few weeks of “investment”)
  • A lot of emails telling you things like “you have a new accrual!”
  • But no payouts for us yet. None.

In addition, their Twitter handle disappeared over the weekend. That, to us, is the beginning of the end.

As with all of these, it’s an experiment – we’re out a little bit of ETH, but we’re also playing with house money, so we’re happy to take one for the team.

Coinreum: AVOID. DON’T INVEST.

Hexabot – We’re Cautiously Optimistic

We sent a little bit over to the Hexabot site, which our buddy Travis first told us about in this interview. Here’s our AFFILIATE LINK: Hexabot.

We sent so little that we have yet to reach the threshold where we have enough to withdraw; that will tell you how close we are to actually calling ourselves “whales.” Ha!

We’ll keep you posted.

Bitconnect – Is It Legit?

That’s a variation on the number one question we get here: “Is Bitconnect a Ponzi Scheme?”

Folks behind Bitconnect counter with a video, which Travis sent to us and we’re sharing here.

To wit, the video tells us:

  • The CEO of Bitconnect Ltd does not exist
  • Bitconnect is now a “Plc” as opposed to a LLC
  • Any rumors that the company is going out of business are not true, per the video’s creator, since they’re just changing the way the company is structured.

That being said, we’re still recommending it – and you can learn about our experiences here: 99 Days of Bitconnect – but, as with anything else, use some serious judgment with any of these platforms. With Bitconnect…

  • Unless you’re a big spender, your deposits are locked down for as many as 299 days
  • In order to achieve the massive compounding some folks talk about, you’ll need to reinvest each $10 in interest earned and do so regularly BUT…
  • Each of those reinvestments starts another 299 day clock.

In other words, you could build a really huge stack of Bitconnect money, then, if the site disappears next year, you may see absolutely none of it. It’s always a risk.

Again, We’re Experimenting

Passive income is like this: you don’t know what works until you find out what works. Your experience may vary. Past performance does not indicate future results.

One last thing: get some POW Tokens, will ya? They’re free – if you use this link we’ll get some, too, but it’s a unique project and the airdrop is still going on.

The Metacoin Q&A – Travis McGarrah – @MakeBitGrow

We’re trying out a new feature here on the site: today we’re running a Q&A with one of the folks we’ve come to know over the past few weeks, Travis McGarrah, whose Twitter handle is @MakeBitGrow. We met Travis online when we were both lamenting the demise of Bithaul.

In this interview, we’re letting Travis share AFFILIATE LINKS and we’ll be sure to mark those as obviously as we can.

Q: What got you into the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency world?

A: I am new to the crypto world. I started researching it this past August, even though I first heard about Bitcoin first back in 2012 or 2013. At that time, I had no idea what it was and today I am kicking myself for not researching and investing back then.

After researching Bitcoin, I decided I need to jump in. In my mind, Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as a whole is the way of the future. If you know about globalization and understand that the world is getting smaller and smaller every day, you start to understand the need for decentralized currency. In a world where people so freely travel from country to country and commerce is more of a global concept, we need to be able to transfer money from person to person without needing a middle man to exchange fiat currency.

When I came to this realization, I decided to learn as much as I can about the industry.

I work a normal 9-to-5 job, so I don’t have a lot of free time to trade. That is why I got so interested in the various lending platforms out there (most notably Bitconnect and Chain.Group) (NOTE: BITCONNECT AFFILIATE LINK is METACOIN’S, CHAIN.GROUP IS TRAVIS’S.) These programs allow me the chance to passively gain income while still working my 9-to-5.

Q: What has been your most successful trade so far?

A: Being new to crypto and not really trading, my best success has been buying into the ICO for Electroneum (ETN). The just went live on Cryptopia last week. (NOTE: The Cryptopia link is to their referral program; however, we have yet to witness any actual results from their referral program.)

During the ICO, I spent $250 and bought 27,500 ETN. That means I paid roughly $0.009 per ETN. As of 11/6/2017 each ETN is valued at $0.05. On that ICO, I have 5.5x’d my investment. I will speak on Electroneum in a later question.

Q: What has been your biggest trading or investing failure?

A: As I previously stated, I am a fan of the programs that allow me to make money passively. Back in the middle of September there was a website called Aurum Bank that was promising huge growth – we are talking 17% per day – compounding over 15 business days. I invested $1,300 with hopes of making large profits in a short time.

The money never got paid and the website went belly-up. In the matter of 3 weeks, I lost $1300. When you lose $1,300, you tend to get very emotional and start doing ridiculous things. So, without regard to logic, I took another $1,500 and put the money in another website named HourPay.net. They are still operating, but they closed my account and took the money.

This means over the course of 22 days, I lost almost $3,000. That was a gut check and it made me take a step back and evaluate the other programs that I was using at the time. Then I decided to only roll with 3 programs (Bitconnect, Chain.Group, and BitPetite). Since the reevaluation, BitPetite has disappeared, but I was lucky enough to break even on that investment.

Q: That’s a nice segue into Passive Income Platforms – Bitconnect and the like – you and I both met when trying to get to the bottom of the Bithaul scam. Which ones are you currently using?

A: Currently, I am in BitConnect and Chain.Group. From my experience, they are both geared to be around for the long haul. And I recently started using a website called Hexabot, (TRAVIS’S AFFILIATE LINK) which is a new program, but they give you .0001 BTC to start and they have a faucet built into the website. So, you can start using the website at no cost.

Q: Have you done any mining? Any success?

A: I have only spent a little bit on Genesis Mining. I spent about $110 on Ethereum mining and Monero mining. When I get more capital, I would love to put more money into mining. I think there is money to be made there, but you should have a lot of money to invest otherwise you don’t make much. With the $110 I spent, I make about $0.09 per day, which really isn’t anything.

NOTE: Here’s the METACOIN AFFILIATE CODE for GENESIS: waVTYG – use it here: Genesis Mining.

Q: What up-and-coming, under-the-radar, or forgotten coin are you a big fan of?

A: ELECTRONEUM!!! All the way, this is the coin that I am most excited about. I previously spoke on this coin, but I think there is a great chance for it to make waves in the cryptocurrency world.

I consider myself to possess above-average intelligence and able to grasp difficult concepts easily. But most of the world can’t grasp new concepts, like cryptocurrency, quickly. What ETN is doing is making cryptocurrency more understandable and accessible by 2 main ways.

  1. Moving the decimal of cryptocurrency 6 places to the right. Most of the world operates in a way that 2 decimals make way more sense than 8 decimals. This is going to allow more people to understand how cryptocurrency can be used in mainstream ways. To this day, I still struggle thinking in 8 decimals.
  2. Allowing ETN mining through an app or normal CPU capabilities. When people think of mining they think about antminers or these super computers with powerful abilities. Electroneum is working to release an app that will allow anyone with a smartphone to mine their coins passively. This will allow people that may not every be able to access cryptocurrency the ability to mine and earn money.

Electroneum just got listed on Cryptopia, but they haven’t released their ICO tokens to the investors. They only tokens available are from people that have mined them. I firmly feel that Electroneum is gearing up to be a game changer. Keep an eye out for it!

Q: Where do you see the Bitcoin price on New Year’s Day, 2018?

A: Selfishly, I want the price to have a dip after the Segwit2x split. But realistically, I see BTC being in the $8,500 – $9,000 price range. The price for Bitcoin will continually increase as people find more needs for cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.

Here’s what Travis looks like; feel free to follow him on Twitter for more insights. He’s one of the good guys…

One last note – be sure to get your POW Tokens while you still can. Free Airdrop. Use this link: POW TOKENS. We get a bonus if you use that link – but you can get bonuses for referring folks, too. Sometime on November 7, they’re doing a Twitter airdrop. You’ll want to follow them and be at the ready.

On Bitcoin $7000, Bitpetite SCAM, and Crypto Legitimacy

First of all, if you’ve been following this site, you know that we try to be as up front as possible. If we see a scam, we’ll point it out. We encourage you to do your own research (DYOR). We are adamant that you should not invest more than you can afford to lose. And we stress, sometimes in bold and italics, that this is all an experiment.

We took a break from blogging for a couple weeks – some of that was to be in our version of a decompression chamber of sorts. Let’s watch the action, let’s watch our baskets of eggs, and let’s ensure that we get our house in order in the background. In our absence – our last post on Bitconnect was on October 17 – we saw a couple things happen, and we’ll try to break them down for you now.

BTW, this might be as good a time as any for the only banner ad we can run on the site right now – that’s right, we’ll talk about how we, too, were scammed by Bitpetite and we’ve had to go back and scrub their ads. So here’s an AFFILIATE LINK for BITCONNECT. DYOR. Don’t invest more than you can afford to lose.

Thing 1: Bitcoin $7000

Hitting $7000 (USD) per Bitcoin seems like a really big deal, given our collective propensity to fall in love with large, round numbers.

Then, if you look back at past posts that talk about our BRED Portfolio, you’ll see that Bitcoin was at $4365 on October 1; this means that you could have brought home a 60 percent gain on your money in a shade more than a month.

That makes it a really HUGE deal.

Then, if you factor in the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) price plus consider the fact that one Bitcoin on January 1 of this year was $973, you’re actually sitting on at least a 6x return.

That is HUGH. MONGOUS.

But, in some respects, it is beside the point – the price of BTC doesn’t matter so much as the number of BTC you are able to accumulate.

You could possibly say that about dozens of coins or tokens – yes there will be some wheat and lots of chaff, but the super, blight-resistant, able to feed millions with one stalk kind of wheat that will emerge will be so valuable that the kings and queens of this new economy won’t much care the USD price.

Seriously – there’s a oft-repeated belief in the Bitcoin world that BTC is, indeed, going to $1 Million. Won’t be next year, in all likelihood (though stranger things have happened), and may not happen in the next twenty years. But it will happen.

We’ve had people ask two things: (1) is it too late to buy? and (2) is this a bubble? I’ll answer the first: no. Actually, let me be more emphatic: NO. If you’re not in the game, you’re not in the game – and because of the beauty of Bitcoin, you can drop $100 and get started and maybe trade a little or sock it away or whatever. (We recommend Coinbase, here’s an AFFILIATE LINK, and your $100 investment will get you a $10 bonus, something we’ll also get.)

But, wise sages at Metacoin HQ, is this a bubble?

Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. In some respects, that is not the point here – the point is that we are in accumulation mode, it’s a landgrab of sorts, and whether Bitcoin goes to $1 Million or drops to $1 might be beside the point. Here’s why:

Because of the way Bitcoin itself was set up and is structured and governed, 21,000,000 is the cap. No more will ever be issued.

While some are asking the bubble question, others – countless others – are building businesses and services and solutions that keep the Bitcoin movement alive and thriving. Bitcoin may end up being used to pay for cups of coffee, or it may end up being used to buy SUVs, or it may be replaced by an even better coin that is ubiquitous. In any event, if the price crashed today, the entire system wouldn’t immediately crash. Miners will still mine. Traders will still trade. Speculators will still speculate. If you think of Bitcoin as a country that has launched a brand new currency, maybe ask if anyone is using that currency or has the potential to use that currency. In that respect, we are just getting warmed up.

In other words…get in the game. Now.

[QUICK “SPONSOR BREAK” – If you haven’t signed up for the POW Token “Airdrop,” it’s not too late. Use this AFFILIATE LINK – POW Token Airdrop – then get ready for the next airdrop, coming next week.]

Thing 2: Bitpetite SCAM

Did we mention lately that this WHOLE THING is AN EXPERIMENT? Well it is.

As we’ve told you here a few times, we’ll put some of our own capital at risk with some of these Passive Income Platforms that we discuss. And, well, there seems to be a pretty below-average track record for these. Is it our luck? Is it the nature of the beast? Is it a combination?

The latest to go belly up is Bitpetite, and we’re annoyed – but not surprised. In fact, because of our experiments with Ambis and Control Finance and Bithaul, we have made it a habit of taking coins and tokens out at every opportunity. We encourage you to do the same.

We’re going to keep experimenting and putting our money at risk AND STRESSING THAT YOU SHOULD DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH AND PAST PERFORMANCE DOES NOT INDICATE FUTURE RESULTS.

We now have just one PIP that we’re using – Bitconnect – but we’re looking at a few more. Stay tuned.

Bitpetite is gone – and we apologize for linking to it and promoting it. As we said, it’s an experiment. These things could fizzle.

This gives us an opportunity to suggest that you spread out your risk. It’s really the only way to go – multiple baskets, multiple investments, and multiple streams of crypto income.

Thing 3: Crypto Legitimacy

Honestly, there may not have been a better piece of news than the CME group announcing that Bitcoin futures would be available by the end of the year. In fact, that alone might drive the legitimacy that the Winkelvoss brothers were waiting for when they applied to have their ETF traded.

We cannot underscore enough that, even if there’s a large pullback in the price of Bitcoin, and if Ethereum and Litecoin and Ripple and a bunch of altcoins follow…it might not matter a ton because Bitcoin, blockchains and cryptocurrencies are, indeed, here to stay.

We’ll give you one brief example: we’ve been talking about POW Token a bit, and one of the things that we’ve done on the site is “validate” users. We do this for small numbers of tokens – but we’ve also learned a ton about where these folks are coming from.

To validate folks, we have to click on their Facebook profile and find evidence that it wasn’t a Facebook profile that was just recently created to get free tokens.

And…they’re not. But that’s not the point: these folks are from everywhere. Asia. South America. Europe. The Middle East. Even a few Americans!

Whether or not POW Token will become the next world beater is not actually the question to ask: it’s whether or not cryptocurrencies have hit critical mass (they have) and whether or not there’s the potential for value to be exchanged and these things are easy to use (they are).

The takeaway? Folks, with all this…the belief is that we are just getting started. So glad you’re along for the roller coaster ride.