Metacoin

Covering Bitcoin, the Blockchain, Altcoins, and Fintech

POW Token

Get Ready for a Wild Week

Here’s why you’ll see some interesting things happening on the crypto markets.

EOS – June 2 Election of Block Producers

It’s a process that we’ve endeavored to understand here and we’re not totally there yet; but, suffice it to say, there’s about to be a whole lot of interest in what happens with EOS.

Why? Well, the crypto project that Dan Larimer is behind has a unique process where its users vote for the “Premier League” of 21 companies that become “block producers.” These “BPs” are incentivized with EOS tokens to keep the system running. (We’ve met a couple of the BP candidates in our crypto journey. If you want to learn more, suggested sites to check out include Block.one, EOS42, EOS New York, and EOS Canada. (Heck, there’s even a BP candidate in Oklahoma.)

The election – voting is also rather complicated – takes place on June 2, though the votes won’t be tabulated for a few days. Then, the continued jockeying begins – those that are in the top 21 need to stay in the good graces – so their systems can’t fail. If they do, 100 backups are ready to take their place.

It’s the culmination of a year-long EOS ICO: and it’s probably going to mean some serious movement – up, down, and sideways – in the cost of the EOS token.

EOS Chart

(Thanks to CoinMarketCap.com for the above chart.) Right now, we’re looking at a 30-day price range of $10.77 to $19, with the price holding steady around $12 or $13 the past couple days. But the math behind (1) becoming a block producer and (2) the ecosystem and the apps being worked on will probably drive speculators into the market this week. And next. And beyond.

No price predictions here – and DYOR, we don’t provide legal or investment advice – but don’t be surprised to see some extremes.

EON – Exscudo Could FINALLY Launch

Delays in projects are inevitable, and the Exscudo ICO didn’t raise a TON of money, so it’s not completely surprising to have seen this one stall a couple times. However, the developers shared the latest update on their Slack channel and…

It appears that the Exscudo exchange will launch by the end of the month. Which gives them a few days. We’re holding on.

We got interested in this project a year ago, invested a tiny amount in the ICO, and helped out with the bounty program. So we’re a little invested in its success. Fingers crossed.

ADA – Cardano Has Been AWFULLY Quiet

Here’s the all-time chart.

ADA Chart

On January 3, ADA traded at $1.22. It’s now trading at 18 cents. That could mean that the market was frothy at the beginning of the year, and now it’s a lot less so. It could also mean…well, it was a new project then – launched last fall – and maybe it’s still getting its sea legs.

Could it be the Ethereum killer? Maybe, maybe not.

Is it trading at a deep discount? Quite possibly.

And Two Projects We Helped/Are Helping With…

Quick update on both POW and Empowr.

First, POW – they put the brakes on their latest developments to fix some system issues. So it’s thinly traded and the “bridge” that will let those who claimed tokens using their Facebook credentials move them over to the Ethereum blockchain was paused while they worked in the background. There’s confidence from the developers, though.

While we’re still bullish on the possibilities, we did pause our firm’s work with them in the interim.

Empowr is currently trading on an exchange called Token.store. The price has stabilized as of late; but, like POW, it’s still really thinly traded.Empowr

With the downward movement this past week of Ethereum shares – dropping into a low-$500 range – each Empowr coin (EMPR) is worth about $1.30.

You earn coins on their system by engaging with other users on a site that looks a little like Facebook; but, it’s less intuitive, so if you do sign up, take advantage of the tutoring on the site from the “Success Coaches.”

Dave from Metacoin remains on the advisory board of Empowr. A project with some potential.

We predict a wild couple weeks on the crypto markets. Buckle up!

 

UPDATED INFO on POW

Editor’s Note: POW has released an announcement via Twitter and Facebook today. Here’s the text:

POW dev team has made the decision today to temporarily pause the development of our “bridge” functionality in order to address core architectural weaknesses to the POWtoken.com site and service. All access and functionality has been suspended for a period of no less than six weeks, in order to allow this to take place.

We’ll keep the original post intact, and we can refer back to it later…

Original title was “Still Time to Score Some Free POW.”

Hi, crypto fans! We’re working with POW on their token launch – we were calling it “The World’s Largest Airdrop” a couple months ago, and we’ll stick with that until someone trademarks the phrase – and efforts continue to get that token (or coin) to the next phase of its development. But, if you’re not a user or not aware of the coin, here’s more info on it, what they’re up to, and how you can get some for your very own. (AND we’ll even tell you how you can use POW.)

DISCLOSURES: We are linking from our affiliate code – so we’ll be compensated in POW tokens if you use the link to sign up. (We are also compensated by the team for our marketing and communications work with the token.)

POW introduction

POW – pronounce it “pow,” like Batman is hitting a bad guy – is a cryptocurrency that decided, from the get go, to be different. No ICO. Ever. Instead, the idea was to take the very first user to claim tokens at the launch 10 BILLION TOKENS. The next person would get 5 BILLION TOKENS, which was 10 billion divided by their place in line (2). You can see where this goes…the calculation will continue like that, dividing 10 billion by your place in line until all the 231 BILLION TOKENS are gone.

That, you might say, is one healthy supply.

POW Totals April 17

But…but…but…Note in the screengrab above how much of this token is still left! That’s right, only 56 percent of the tokens have been claimed. And if 10,000 people were to claim their POW, if you add in the referral fees, that would only ratchet up the claimed total to 133.4 billion tokens.

They’re playing the long game at POW.

Why It’s Cheaper Now Than It May Ever Be Again

The POW team has been working diligently on something they call “the bridge,” and they’ve been up front on Facebook and Telegram in discussing what that will do and how it’s progressing. The tokens are claimed through the web, and you need to use a Facebook or Twitter account to claim them. (You can do both – here’s that POW link again.) The bridge will let users move those tokens off of the POW website and onto the blockchain. The maximum amount any one user will be able to move is 1 million a day; the maximum the system will release is 1 billion per day. This will help solve the liquidity issue (since traders don’t have many to buy and sell right now on the exchanges), but it won’t create a glut.

POW Price April 17

Right now, the coin, frankly, is thinly traded. When the bridge launches and people move their coins over from the website to the blockchain, it is expected that there will be some wild swings for a bit, then the price will stabilize, and the next question will likely be…

Can You Use It “In the Wild?”

That has already been happening – but, in all candor, the number of transactions appears to have subsided quite a bit during the past few days, likely due to anticipation of the bridge launch.

Transactions

We’ve seen days with thousands of transactions – and, since we’ve worked with them (first as “validators,” making sure that users weren’t bots), we’ve seen at least anecdotal evidence of people paying for services with POW (especially in places like Vietnam and parts of Africa).

We’ve thrown some back and forth between friends to test the web-based system, and we even did a little bit of work to help out someone in the cryptosphere and were paid in POW.

Where we think this will grow, though, is in places where phones have leapfrogged other banking services – and where there’s a need for micro-payments for things.

Do Your Own Research, But…

We’re not going to hazard a guess on the price front – that would be reckless, and, since we’re working with them, we don’t want to be seen as “pumping” the value of a coin.

We do like what POW can potentially do to level the playing field globally. It’s not the only solution, but, if you’re unbanked, under-banked, or in an economy with onerous capital controls (like Venezuela), is there value in taking advantage of a crypto like POW? There very well may be.

Again, here’s that POW link. Go get some.

Finally…The McAfee Factor

If you’re not familiar with John McAfee, Google him. He signed up as Chief Advisor at POW at the tail end of 2017.

He travels the world, proselytizing about crypto just about everywhere, so getting his imprimatur was a big score for the POW team. His tweets move markets in crypto and he’s had to fight Twitter to keep from the fake tweets and bots making the rounds.

But suffice it to say that if he finds POW compelling, maybe it’s worth looking into?

Soapbox

We’ll get off our soapbox here at HQ, but, really…do you need another excuse to get some POW? Go. Get some.

How To Give Your Blockchain Startup A Chance

Blockchain StartupsWe’re well beyond the tipping point: blockchain startups are now everywhere, and ICOs are the new way to get funding for your product or service. We’re not going to talk you out of launching, then, but we will try, with this blog post, to give you at least a little tough love. We’re not going to discuss the price of bitcoin today, and we’re not going to dive in on which cryptocurrencies have the potential to go 10x. What we are going to do is this:

We’ll tell you how to give your blockchain startup a chance.

Before we start, a quick primer: “blockchain” refers to digital ledger technology that keeps a record of cryptocurrency transactions. Think of a network of computers that all have the same notebook, and when that notebook gets updated on one computer, and that update is verified as actually having happened by a couple more computers, the notebook’s contents are broadcast to a whole bunch of computers at once.

“Blocks” of transaction code is kept together in a “chain,” and that chain can’t be changed once it is verified. Thus, the blockchain.

Here at Metacoin, we’ve been blogging about bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and the blockchain for more than a year (!!!), and we recently started to consult with companies that are in this space on how best to communicate their message and market their product. So we decided it was time, maybe, to offer a little bit of advice – not just from the year-plus in this space, but from Dave’s 20-plus years in marketing and communications.

But…Why Today’s Post?

Being up front and honest with you, one thing “triggered” today’s post: the launch of a blockchain-enabled interface by Whenhub, the startup founded by the ubiquitous persuasion guru Scott Adams. Since his correct prediction of the election of Donald Trump in 2016, much more attention has been paid to Scott’s work as a prognosticator.

But it seems as if he’s been talking about Whenhub for a LONG time now – they’ve been solving problems for a while. Is this a case of “put it on the blockchain” – or a modern version of “we need a web strategy,” or “we need a cloud strategy”?

Digging around more than a little on the site this morning – it appears that the blockchain interface thingamajig is brand new – tells me that…NO, this is not just a blatant attempt to borrow the latest corporate buzzword and leverage crypto mania to get rich. This – and a couple others we’ll talk about – use the blockchain in ways for which it was designed, thus giving this particular blockchain startup a chance at success. Here’s our three-part sniff test:

1. Does It Solve An Actual Problem?

This is really almost stupid-simple: someone needs an expert to answer a problem, provide advice or counsel, of strategize with. As opposed to posting a project and looking for someone and wading through proposals, you just go to the site, find someone whose rates match your budget and whose experience matches what you’re after, and you transact business.

Whenhub answers the question that one of my business mentors used to ask all the time: “what business problem are you trying to solve?”

We’ve met others as we talk about helping them with their marketing and communications issues, and we can tell you that the above is likely the biggest question they should ask.

For instance, one group solving an actual problem is Medcredits – access to doctors and nurses globally can be tough; vetting those service providers and verifying their licensure is also pretty important. They’re solving an actual problem (or two or three, in fact), so their success – while not assured – is a lot more likely than a lot of others in this space.

2. Does It Use the Blockchain – And Use It Effectively?

One of the hurdles for bitcoin is that people are slow to actually use it. Go ask friends: “own any bitcoin?” Then ask them what they use it for. You’ll either get the “it’s an investment” answer, or you’ll get something like “it’s digital gold!” Few people will tell you that they pay their service providers with it.

But bitcoin is blockchain-enabled – more accurately, bitcoin invented the blockchain – so there’s where your focus should be with your ICO or blockchain startup. Blockchain(s) – there are many of them, but we’ll use the singular term to talk about the technology – are supposed to make life easier, and make transactions more secure, with the lack of a single point of failure.

Another term that’s an offshoot of this technology: Ethereum’s “smart contract” concept. It is just like it sounds: certain actions happen, certain conditions are met, a smart contract is executed, and a transaction takes place. (If A takes place then B takes place, C amount of money gets sent to account D.)

Whenhub uses smart contracts – and those smart contracts, coupled with what appear to be the “A” above (service provider is available) and the “B” (consumer purchases time with service provider discussing the issue or problem), ensure that the transaction takes place.

This is an effective use of blockchain technology – increasing this startup’s chances.

3. Does the Use of the Blockchain Decrease Friction?

Friction is a pain, and this is why people loved the Starbucks app when it launched, and love the pre-order and pickup functions just as much, if not more. Humans, sadly, cause friction just by being humans. (Tim Ferriss, author of The Four-hour Workweek, champions anything in business that “takes humans out of the equation.” There are issues with this long-term, but those issues can possibly be solved by a new batch of young, eager, humans developing frictionless computer programs and blockchain systems.)

The thought of a drive to a strip mall to sit down with an expert might give some hives; a frictionless meeting over the phone with a one-on-one conversation removes a good chunk of that friction.

Think of the other ways that the blockchain can potentially reduce friction: billing and payments are automatic and smart contract-enabled. Licensure or certifications can be verified in moments and the computer won’t go down (because there’s not one computer but potentially thousands, or tens of thousands, that verify the license and keep a record of it).

The possibilities are endless.

BONUS POINTS:

Don’t ignore whether or not your name and your own lingo help a lot or are barriers to your success.

Here’s where Whenhub’s use of alliteration and naming score some serious persuasion points, thus increasing their chance of success. Credits are called “WHEN” and the network – “Whenhub Interface Network” – is called “WIN.” When do you need it? Is it a win? You could go on and on and on, but just saying those words out loud either answer the question of how real-time effective it could be: “WHEN? RIGHT NOW!!!” or they tell you that the site is a “Win!”

Rivetz is another one we met somewhat recently – you may not care to know all the details behind how they do what they do, but if you imagine a rivet being tightened to secure something in place…hey, I wonder if they are involved in cybersecurity at all? (Do you have a mental image of rivets tightening something? Even better if it’s Rosie the Riveter in your head.)

One of the coins we work with at Metacoin is POW (that’s a REFERRAL LINK and you should get some, claim some free if you haven’t claimed some yet); cryptocurrency enthusiasts will note that POW stands for “proof of work” and will argue that POW isn’t really a proof of work coin. The masses – the real target for the business – will only say “hey, let me send you 5000 POW for yesterday’s coffee.” (And yes, the founders of POW are hoping that someday they’ll be talked about like the “Bitcoin Pizza” is talked about.) Alliteration does not hurt, easy to remember helps quite a bit – and you’ll find that a lot of consumers just want to know if your coin or token is worth something.

Can We Help?

Yes, we’re here to help. If you need help answering the above questions with your blockchain startup, let us know. If you have answered those questions but are currently stuck, let us know that, too.

Thanks for reading.

Our 2018 Crypto Investment Plan

2018

EDITOR’S NOTE: With the activities of mid-January, such as the sharp pullback of pretty much all coins, plus the crash of Bitconnect, we’ve updated this post on January 17.

Anyone else feel really blessed and ready to make it a phenomenal year?

Frankly, we feel like we hit the ground sprinting in 2018. Part of it was due to a little bit of luck, part of it was due to some planning, and part of it was due to the discipline to just hang tight for a while.

For instance, we made our own luck with a couple of timely picks; we also called ourselves HODLers on at least a couple of occasions – ones where weaker hands might have folded up the tents.

But we screwed up a couple places, too: our first ever trade with DASH meant that we took profits of 25% off the table and closed out our entire interest. Let’s never speak of this again.

Starting with a Bang

We’ve gone on and on about Risk Management here. And we also feel that we’ve experimented at least enough with some concepts – you can read a whole bunch more over at the Passive Income page on this site – to at least have a firm understanding of what could work, what won’t work, and what things are worth our time.

Finally, we think we’ve gotten a good chunk of knowledge from some others on the web – especially “Crypto Twitter,” which has been a wonderful world for us so far (with thanks to some characters like @BambouClub, @crazy_crypto, @haydentiff, and @BryceWeiner, who all share their approaches to coins and tokens and various crypto ecosystems – and all bring rather distinctive POVs).

It was BambouClub himself who challenged us to put a plan to paper – and stick to it. We had the plan to paper part sketched out – but we needed to formalize it and put it in writing.

And the “stick to it” thing we’re also going to TRY to do. More to come on that…

Enough Background: SHARE THE PLAN!!!

Behold, our 2018 Crypto Investment Plan. With the usual caveats:

  • This is not individual advice
  • Invest at your own risk
  • Seek professional help for things like taxes, accounting, legal, and the like
  • “DYOR” – if you learned one acronym last year, it’s that one. Do Your Own Research.

Let’s get started with the $1,250,000 question:

Should BRED Be Part of Your Plan?

How quickly can we answer that with a resounding YES?

If you read our post from New Year’s Day, you know how well you would have done with BRED – that combo of Bitcoin, Ripple’s XRP token, Ethereum, and Dash – to the tune of wild, crazy, insane returns from buying and holding for one whole year.

BRED 2017

This was, and still is, probably as close to a Bitcoin Mutual Fund as you can get. But, for 2018, it needed to be tweaked, to accommodate for a couple things, including main Bitcoin forks, the Ethereum fork from more than a year ago, and the crazy returns from Ripple (meaning that you are buying fewer XRP tokens than you had a year ago, because they’ve gone from penny stock to blue chip holding rather quickly). Hence:

2018 BRED Allocation
Reweighted to start the new year

We’ll answer the “how much?” question a little later; but now that the overall yes/no question on BRED is settled, we probably need to agree on an altcoin strategy, too: everything down the totem pole that could make sense to be part of the mix.

What About the Altcoins?

Our approach to altcoins isn’t random – we spent most of 2017 learning which sorts of projects appealed to us, and which ones had the potential to turn into something that replicates the success of the BRED portfolio. They’re somewhat diverse – big and small, different kinds of projects – and, as you can see from this chart, they also run the gamut from multi-billion-dollar projects to tiny-but-poised. Here’s a snapshot of our eight coins – but remember to DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH.

Alt Portfolio

As we revisit some of the highlights and lowlights from 2017, we know that our biggest mistakes were when we chased quick returns and weren’t in love with the project. In these cases, we think these projects have tremendous potential, and it’s likely a rather diverse enough group to spread out our risk.

And we lucked out on a couple: ADA and HTML have both gone up at least 5 times since we bought in, and TRX was a gift courtesy of a Binance airdrop, so we held on and bought more.

Where we think we might see some real growth, though, is toward the bottom of the list. We’ve held COSS for long enough to be officially called #HODLers – “Hold On for Dear Life” – and our stake has allowed us to realize gains on a USD basis from Bitcoin’s price spike. And BURST has us so crazy excited: we were working on a blog post IN JUNE about the potential for that coin…before all of its developments.

There needs to be room in the portfolio for more, though. Let’s briefly address Passive Income next.

Our Changing Passive Income Approach

Well, the breaking news as we update this post goes as follows:

Bitconnect Scam

We took some lumps and lost some BTC (and ETH, and even some LTC) investing in passive income programs that went belly up. One saving grace: we have investigated mining and staking, and that’s where our Passive Income for 2018 will take us.

Genesis Mining will be where re reinvest in this category, and we’ll also invest in coins where there’s passive interest that pays – like HTMLCoin, for instance – and also check out inexpensive mining for coins like BURST.

There’s one more bucket, but what do we call it and what do we use it for?

Take A Flier, Please

We were able to confirm on Investopedia that we’re using the term correctly, so we’re calling this category “Fliers.” This includes:

  • Coins that we invested in, lost interest in, but didn’t totally get rid of (LBRY is one)
  • ICOs or other projects that are either thinly traded or haven’t fully launched (Exscudo, POW)
  • Airdrops (we’re still finding coins that we were granted that…maybe might be good projects eventually)
  • “Others” – serving as a catch-all term for anything else that doesn’t fit neatly into a category.

We now have four different buckets – so it’s time to figure out the right allocation for each.

Here It Is: Our 2018 Crypto Investment Plan

 

18 Portfolio

Let us explain what’s going on here. We decided to allocate in more of a “barbell strategy” – heavily weighted toward core coins on one side (40% BRED) and toward alts on the other (the 40% Alts category). The “Target” column is the amount we want to see our allocations get to – but, as you can see in the “3-Jan” column, in some respects we have a ways to go.

Coins that we specifically hope to make up ground with we’ve highlighted in pink: we will add where we can, either through profits on something like Bitconnect, or, if we end up with an extreme winner, taking some profits from that coin or token.

Right now, we need to reweight a little away from Alts (59%) and toward BRED (22%); we also know that the Fliers are not an exact science, since some of those airdrops aren’t worth much – but could be worth a ton someday – and others don’t hit the market for a bit, so pricing guesstimations are just that. (In those cases, by the way, we have simply used the value of the investments we’ve made as the value of the coin right now. Exscudo, for instance, claimed to sell at an equivalent of $2, so we calculated the BTC price and offset that for any re-distribution of tokens that occurred later.)

Why They’re “Goals”

We agreed to put this on paper, but we also didn’t want to upset the apple cart. That’s why we’re calling them goals: we aim to get our overall crypto portfolio as close to the weighting as we can by February 1.

But we also give ourselves the leeway to make changes as we see fit. For instance, TRX cannot possibly sustain its run, can it? XRP can’t have anywhere near the run it had last year, could it? And so on, and so forth: while we don’t think we’ll deviate from BRED, we might make a change or two to the Alt portion of the portfolio.

And we can’t be held to a strict “40-40-10-10” formula. (If, in theory, we did that in 2017 with BRED but decided to reallocate each quarter, who’s to say what that would have done to our approach?)

Our Suggestion For You…

Again, this is not individual advice, and seek the counsel of those wise folks in your spheres of influence.

However, this has been a great exercise for us, the act of getting things on paper. We’ve questioned a couple of our own assumptions, and we’ve also had to ask ourselves just how much risk we want to shoulder.

In this vein, we think we’re prepared for 2018, come what may.

We’d love to hear your thoughts.

 

 

 

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!