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Coinbase announced wallet support for Bitcoin Cash (BCH), the cryptocurrency created when Bitcoin (BTC) forked on August 1st, 2017. At the same time, the company's dedicated trading platform, GDAX.com, added the ability to trade Bitcoin Cash. The moves sent Bitcoin down and Bitcoin Cash up, as investors moved from one cryptocurrency to the other. As of this writing, Bitcoin was trading on GDAX at $16,666.62 $16,150, down 11.96% $14.52% on the day. Bitcoin Wed, 20 Dec 2017 01:31:35 erc20 compatible wallet coinbase. List of Top Websites Like Tonopahhistoricminingpark.com. MinerGate is a mining pool created by a. And represent the ownership of property. The big idea behind Ethereum has attracted. Cloud Mining: Pool. At Bitcoin Cloud Mining you can find a. The most advanced mining rigs today. ETHEREUM CLASSIC CLOUD MINING; ETH – ETHEREUM CLOUD MINING; LTC. • You Want A More Resilient Feel – The Purple moves immediately back into place when you move around. It has a very bouncy/resilient feel, much more so than any of the Tempurpedic models. If that’s the type of feel you think you’d like, then Purple would probably be the way to go. • You Want A Temperature Neutral Mattress – The gel construction makes the Purple mattress a completely temperature neutral mattress. That means you won’t sleep overly hot or overly cold because of the mattress. The Breeze models from Tempurpedic do a good job of making the mattress sleep cooler, but I think Purple takes the cake as far as keeping a neutral sleeping temperature. • You Want A Combination Of Firmness And Pressure Relief – I found Purple to be unique in that it felt both somewhat firm yet very pressure relieving at the same time. It was a cool feeling where I felt very well supported while feeling almost no pressure on my hips and shoulders. • You Want A Little More Value – Through the online-only business model, the value you get from the Purple is more than you get from any Tempurpedic model. Nov 14, 2013 - Fall Book Review. Book lovers – including librarians, professors, teachers, and students – convene for the biannual. Book Review Session, in spring and fall. Metzger, Steve. Polar Bear Morning. Thompson, Lauren. Prince of the Elves. Princess and the Packet of Frozen Peas, The. Higher rate of 10–12 meteorites (cloud cover is lower at night than predicted). Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 38:427–483. In the surrounding soil and in melt crusts of thermally altered bed rocks, spherules and inclusions of iron silicon [3] and carbon [4] materials could be found. Rave Reviews Releases List of the Best Mattresses for 2017. BEST MATTRESS FOR THE MONEY. Rave Reviews Releases List of 50 Best Pet. This is simply because of the big price difference between Purple and any of the Tempur-Pedic models. Pick Tempurpedic If: • You Want To Choose From A More Established Company – Tempurpedic has been around much longer than Purple. That means you get the benefit of years of customer reviews. You will have a better idea of how each of their mattresses will hold up over time because there is so much more data available. • You Want Firmness Options – Purple will be a good fit for a majority of sleepers, but if you know the exact firmness you want, you might be able to get a better fit with a Tempur-Pedic. They make each mattress model with a specific firmness in mind ( being the firmest and the being the softest), so you should be able to easily match your preference to one of the available models. • You Want A Slow-Moving, Memory Foam Feel – The feel of most Tempurpedic models is very different from the feel of the Purple. If you like to slowly sink into the mattress, then you will most likely prefer most of the Tempur-Pedic models over the Purple mattress. Notes On Sleeping Hot Some people worry that their mattress could sleep hot, and that is a common complaint about some Tempur-Pedic models. The Breeze models directly address this issue and do a good job of keeping a cooler sleeping temperature. The Purple mattress is temperature neutral. You should have no concerns about the mattress sleeping hot. It’s simply not an issue because of the way the mattress is constructed. Notes On Motion Isolation Both Purple and the Tempur-Pedic models do a great job at isolating motion. If I had to pick a winner, I would say that the Tempur-Pedic models do a slightly better job at isolating motion, but it’s pretty close. Both are a great option for couples because of this. Notes On Price/Value The obvious difference between Purple and the Tempur-Pedic line of mattresses is the price. Purple only sells online, so from that fact alone it is able to price its product much lower. If it sold through retail stores, it would probably be priced around $2,000-2,500. Overall, I do believe the value of the Purple is higher, simply from the fact the business model allows them to price the mattress at such a low level. That is not to say that everyone should definitely buy the Purple, however. Overall The difference between the two companies and their products is vast. The feel of the Purple is very different from any of the Tempur-Pedic mattresses. Given the major feel difference and the price difference, you should be able to assess which mattress would be the best fit for you. See our full and. This post was last updated on May 1st, 2017 at 4:00 pm. Blue says July 21, 2017 Just read this and it seems very difficult for people to know why Tempur Pedic is a bit more pricey then most mattresses or it’s durability factor but I’ve known about tempur for years and have seen their products come out for a good time. Tempur – Pedic isn’t for everyone that’s true but it is the most durable mattress when it comes to long lasting and longevity. This has been backed up for quite a long time for me due to personal experiences and working with this company. I’ve seen prototypes from 1999 that are still the same as the day they came in. Even a 2001 model shows no signs of breaking down or anything else. As for Purple I doubt they can hold up the same results I’ve looked at their foam and it’s density is sad and pathetic in comparison to be honest. Tempur – Pedic is a much heavier mattress because of its high density and that’s how I know they last so much better. And yes I know this seems a tad bit biased but in comparison to the other companies for a foam mattress none of them are as heavy as a tempur mattress and that disturbs me when it comes to structural integrity. Sarah says July 26, 2017 Thanks for this run down of both. I’ve been looking and trying to decide which I want. I’ve always enjoyed the feel of the tempurpedic in stores but haven’t invested due to the price. Purple intrigues me and despite some people’s claim to the opposite I do think they have an innovated product. No other mattress looks like it, and the egg test they did was very interesting with results being duplicated by various parties. I’m still unsure if we should invest because the price is still fairly expensive but this comparison does help me in that decision process and I’m still leaning twoard purple. Artemio Layug says October 7, 2017 I’ve seen Purple advertised and I was intrigued. If Purple was available in 2009 I would have bought it, instead I bought a tempurpedic for around $1800.00 to replace my then 15-year old mattress which was giving me back pain. Thanks for the review though, I was actually thinking about buying a Purple. But now you’ve set my mind at ease about the Tempurpedic which you say is as good as the Purple. With the Tempurpedic backpain is a rare occurrence. It only happens when I’ve somehow contorted my body inappropriately when sleeping. ALPINE, Utah — Specialty sleep bedding veterans Tony and Terry Pearce are planning to enter the online bedding arena with a new company called Purple that features a “hyper-elastic polymer” comfort and support layer. This cutaway shows the purple polymer layer inside the new Purple mattress. This is the new Purple mattress being offered by bedding veterans Tony and Terry Pearce. They say their Purple mattress, topper and seat cushion provide superior pressure relief and comfort and stand apart from competitors’ products. The Pearces have launched a KickStarter campaign that has already secured pledges that have exceeded their original goal of $25,000. The KickStarter video pokes fun at the in-store mattress shopping experience. It can be seen here: The Pearces, who have made bedding products under the ZZZest, GelMakers and EdiZone banners, say their new company represents the culmination of their work in the bedding arena and offers consumers something unique. “The difference between us and companies like Casper is that we have the top-layer amazing technology that is not found in any of them (they are all simple foam-only mattresses made with commodity technologies like memory foam and latex),” said Tony Pearce, CEO of Purple. “Our Purple top layer features our patented pressure-releasing technology proven around the world in both medical beds and consumer beds for two decades.” This is the first time that technology has been made in king-size pieces, covering 100% of the surface of the bed, Tony Pearce said. Retails for the Purple products range from $110 for a seat cushion to $1,099 for a queen mattress. The queen bed is being offered to KickStarter backers for $899. “Several hundred thousand beds have been sold, mostly internationally, in the $2,500 to $4,000 range with this technology covering only 60% of the bed surface,” Tony Pearce said. “We’ve invested three years and several million dollars making equipment and tooling and perfecting this full-coverage Purple, which we characterize as hyper-elastic polymer.” That technology has been characterized as gel in the past, but Tony Pearce said that gel “has come to mean memory foam with widely-disbursed little bits or swirls of gel. Our queen has 58 pounds of hyper-elastic polymer, compared with maybe one to five pounds of gel in a mattress with ‘gel’ in it.” The KickStarter campaign runs through early November. In mid-November the Pearces plan to begin testing new videos and landing pages for the company. They plan the official advertising launch for January. “Purple has engaged with five marketing companies that have shown recent major success in Internet product launches, forming a team to take a large share of the ‘new’ online-only mattress business,” Tony Pearce said. He said another of his companies, WonderGel, has sold over 100,000 cushions made from 100% hyper-elastic polymer last year, and looks to ship more than 200,000 this year. These cushions are now being converted from WonderGel cushions to Purple-branded seat and lumbar cushions. The Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index provides the latest estimate of the total energy consumption of the Bitcoin network. The trick is to get all miners to agree on the same history of transactions. Every miner in the network is constantly. We also know VISA processed 111.2 billion transactions in 2017. With the help of. Bitcoin Miner Pool Lets your Mine Bitcoins (BTC/Satoshi) Free in large volumes. Have you read about Bitcoin or Ethereum? 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(Reuters) – Two-thirds of Americans are uncomfortable about the idea of riding in self-driving cars, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll, underscoring one of many challenges for companies spending billions of dollars on the development of autonomous vehicles. While 27 percent of respondents said they would feel comfortable riding in a self-driving car, poll data indicated that most people were far more trusting of humans than robots and artificial intelligence under a variety of scenarios. The Reuters/Ipsos poll found a wide disparity of opinion by gender and age, with men generally more comfortable than women about using self-driving vehicles and millennials more comfortable than baby boomers. () Among men, 38 percent said they would feel comfortable riding in a self-driving car and 55 percent said they would not. Among women, only 16 percent said they would feel comfortable and 77 percent said they would not. Among those skeptical of driverless cars was California resident Phoebe Barron. “I don’t want to be the first guinea pig,” she said in an interview. Colorado resident Sonja Coy told Reuters she had a more positive view. Self-driving cars “are a great innovation and technology with a lot of potential,” she said. “However, I‘m concerned with how liability will fall in the case of accidents, where there are both self-driving and regular cars on the road,” Coy said. FILE PHOTO: Waymo unveils a self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivan during the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., January 8, 2017. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo Like most people, she said she had not yet ridden in a self-driving vehicle. Companies testing the vehicles in the United States and elsewhere have provided limited public access so far. “We’re talking about abstract things that many people have not experienced firsthand,” said Jeremy Carlson, principal automotive analyst with IHS Markit. Automotive and technology industry executives are pushing U.S. Lawmakers to pass legislation that would loosen restrictions on testing and deploying self-driving cars. However, the legislation is currently stalled in the Senate. In the meantime, companies from General Motors Co to Alphabet Inc’s Waymo are planning to deploy the first wave of self-driving vehicles over the next three years. Industry officials and analysts have said providing convincing reassurances about safety is an urgent task for advocates of autonomous vehicle technology. The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted in mid-January and collected responses from 2,592 adults. Other recent surveys have also highlighted widespread doubts among U.S. Consumers about self-driving cars, in the absence of any direct experience with them. In its 114-year history, Ford has been many kinds of automaker. A manufacturing innovator, a hawker of Mustang muscle, a pickup powerhouse. Now the company that helped put a car (or two) in every garage wants to be something else altogether: an operating system. “With the power of AI and the rise of autonomous and connected vehicles, for the first time in a century, we have mobility technology that won’t just incrementally improve the old system but can completely disrupt it,” CEO Jim Hackett said in a keynote address at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, trumpeting the pivot. “A total redesign of the surface transportation system with humans and community at the center.” As Ford executives move to execute the plan, they unveiled yesterday a reorganization of the automaker’s young mobility business, with two acquisitions to help it along. It’s all in service of a new, very 21st century goal. Ford will put less effort into convincing people to plunk down their credit cards for personal cars (though that’s still important) and more into moving them from A to B, with a little Ford badge tacked onto whatever gets them there. It’s a turbulent time for traditional automakers, which have to keep making money today while aggressively prepping for the market changes—carshare, ridehailing, self-driving—that will happen tomorrow. Ford’s news comes eight months after the company, a former furniture exec who oversaw the formation of Ford’s mobility subsidiary—and promised a greater vision for the future. Earlier this week, the Detroit automaker. Ford blamed rising metal prices while CFO Bob Shanks said, “We have to be far fitter than we are.” In lean times, every expenditure merits extra scrutiny. And while Ford Mobility President Marcy Klevorn did not disclose how much it spent on its new companies, she says they’re important steps on Ford’s path to becoming more than a big ol’ automaker. “We did an assessment of our strategy and what our gaps were and the speed we wanted to go,” she says. “We looked at where we thought we needed a really fast infusion of help.” Still, it’s all a little woolly. The thing about being a platform that connects the world is that others have to agree to come aboard. So while Ford tries to woo partners—other carmakers, mobility companies like Uber or Lyft, carsharing companies, bikesharing providers, entire cities—the carmaking continues. Make money now, prep for tomorrow. OK, let’s look at the details of this new arrangement for tomorrow. Acquisition A is Autonomic, a Palo Alto–based company with a cloud-based platform called wait for it the Transportation Mobility Cloud. Autonomic seeks to build a kind of iOS for cities, managing data and transactions between city-dwellers and agencies and companies that provide payment processing, route mapping, mass transit, and city infrastructure services. That sounds vague, because it is. “By making all these different services available we have no idea what’s going to come so we’re super excited,” Autonomic CEO Sunny Madra. Autonomic seeks to be the go-to platform for other car manufacturers, too, and Klevorn indicated Ford hopes to monetize its cloud service quickly. Acquisition B is TransLoc, a 14-year-old Durham, North Carolina–based company that makes software to help cities, corporate campuses, and universities manage their transportation systems, from traditional fixed-route service to on-demand ridehailing apps like Uber and Lyft. “Ford is interested in taking the streets back in the city, and getting more people out of single occupancy cars,” says CEO Doug Kaufman. “I think one of the reasons that we ended up with Ford and not some other suitor is because our missions are so aligned.” Ford’s execs said they would lean on TransLoc’s existing sales relationships with hundreds of cities and transit agencies to accelerate its platform plan. Meanwhile, the company is restructuring its Ford Mobility subsidiary. Autonomic is moving into a new accelerator section called Ford X. The Mobility Business Group will handle microtranist service Chariot, car services app FordPass, and digital services. Mobility Platforms and Products will cover autonomous vehicle partnerships and transportation as a service. And a new mobility marketing group will sell it all to the world. (Argo AI, the autonomous vehicle developer that Ford, is still technically an independent company.) It’s close to a throw-it-all-see-what-sticks move, but it does show Ford is charting a different path into this new world than its great rival. General Motors, which acquired startup Cruise Automation in 2016, is all about the autonomous and electric vehicle, with self-driving Chevy Bolts testing on roads in Phoenix and San Francisco. It’s even starting to think about making actual, honest-to-goodness driverless vehicles, this month for a steering wheel– and pedal-free EV, and touting plans to get the thing on the road by 2019. The company’s, which provides car rental and sharing in 11 American cities, could be a great, data-hoovering starting point for a delivery and ridesharing service. And GM employees in San Francisco are using Cruise Anywhere, an Uber-like platform,. But GM hasn’t as overtly attempted to partner with cities yet, and its broader. Will GM provide transportation services and not just an excellent autonomous, electric car? Can any American automaker do that? Ford has been pretty consistent about its admittedly hazy vision for the future of mobility. (At least, consistent with its messaging.) “The bigger risk is doing nothing,” executive chairman Bill Ford told WIRED, as he outlined a future where a single, digital ticket could buy you a ride on a car, taxi, subway, bus, or bicycle. “I am very confident that we can compete and morph into something quite different.” Now it’s time to deliver. (Reuters) – Apple Inc’s move on Wednesday to give iPhone owners information about the health of their batteries reverses the company’s longstanding refusal to make such information available directly on iPhones and iPads, even though battery health has long been easy to check on Apple’s Mac computers. Apple said an update to its iOS operating system will show the phone’s battery health and recommend whether the battery needs to be replaced. It will also let users turn off a controversial piece of software that slows the phone’s performance in some situations when the battery is flagging. Apple acknowledged in December that its software sometimes deliberately slows phones with weak batteries. Apple apologized and lowered the price of battery replacements in its stores from $79 to $29 for affected phones. Critics say Apple has obfuscated the fact that a worn-out battery not only fails to hold a charge, it also degrades the phone’s performance. The company’s lack of transparency on the issue has pushed people to buy a new phone rather than a new battery, these people say. “The battery wears out,” said Kyle Wiens, chief executive of iFixit, which publishes repair guides for iPhones and sells replacement parts. “They have been pretending like the battery doesn’t wear out. They’ve made billions of dollars on that pretense.” Apple has always banned battery-health apps from the App Store for security reasons. While a few developers had found ways around the restrictions, their apps stopped showing a key piece of information – the “charge cycle count,” or how many times the battery has been drained and recharged – after a 2016 software update. Rogerio Hirooka of Lirum Labs said his company’s app lost charge cycle counts in 2016 but can still provide information on charge capacity, which can be used to determine whether the battery is at the end of its life. He said a routine bug-fix for the app was rejected by Apple in December, just before Apple acknowledged the battery-slowing issue. Apple rejected his app because it provides “potentially inaccurate diagnostic functionality” that could “mislead or confuse your users,” according to documents from the app review process seen by Reuters. Apple explains that “there is no publicly available infrastructure to support iOS diagnostic analysis,” according to the documents. Apple declined to comment on why battery diagnosis is available on the Mac but not on the iPhone, or why it rejected the update to Hirooka’s app. “That fact that they tell you (battery health) on the Mac but it’s a forbidden secret on the iPhone is crazy,” Wiens said. All lithium ion batteries degrade over time. Until the software update announced Wednesday becomes available – and Apple has not given a specific date – the only way to check an iPhone battery is to take the device to an Apple Store or hook the phone up to a Mac computer running special third-party software. Repair advocates have long criticized Apple and other technology companies for making batteries hard for users to access and replace. Apple has been lobbying against “right to repair” laws in several U.S. States that would require it to sell parts to independent repair shops. SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Alphabet Inc launched a new business unit on Wednesday that will sell cyber security software to Fortune 500 companies, the latest move by the parent of Google to become a big player in corporate computing. The new unit, dubbed Chronicle, is betting on the premise that machine learning software, a type of artificial intelligence, can sift and analyze massive stores of data to detect cyber threats more quickly and precisely than is possible with traditional methods. Stephen Gillett, chief executive of Chronicle and a former top official at the cyber firm Symantec Corp, said access to Google’s expertise in automated data analysis would give the company an edge. Alphabet’s big cash pile and existing customer relationships also make Chronicle a threat to security tools vendors such as Symantec, Palo Alto Networks Inc and Cylance Inc. The global cyber security market is worth nearly $100 billion, according to market researcher Gartner. But analysts note that previous efforts by internet search and networking companies to get into the cyber security business have faltered. “Being the heavy hitter and even having small teams spun out of that doesn’t translate to instant success,” said Avivah Litan, a vice president at Gartner. Gillett, on a conference call, declined to specify how Chronicle’s technology works and would not give the exact number of companies testing the service. Chronicle also houses VirusTotal, a virus-scanning tool Google acquired in 2012 that charges for premium features. The cyber security initiative reflects Alphabet’s desire to expand beyond its core online advertising business at Google and become a major player in enterprise computing technology. Google is a distant rival to Amazon.com Inc in cloud computing infrastructure and lags far behind Microsoft Corp in workplace productivity software. Gillett, also a former Starbucks Corp chief information officer, said Chronicle aims to identify problems in seconds or minutes instead of hours or days. The process would be aided by lowering customers’ data storage costs. Keeping years of logs can make the threat-detection process more effective, he said. Gillett co-founded Chronicle in February 2016 with former Google cyber security leaders Shapor Naghibzadeh and Mike Wiacek. Gillett met them after becoming executive-in-residence at GV, Alphabet’s venture capital investment arm, in 2015. Chronicle, based at Alphabet’s Mountain View, California, headquarters, becomes the third business spun out of the company’s “X” research lab and into the holding company – a process it calls “graduating.” It follows healthcare unit Verily and self-driving vehicle company Waymo. Alphabet has also acquired companies that operate under its umbrella, including thermostat maker Nest. Astro Teller, the head of X known as the “captain of moonshoots,” said his team pursued cyber security technology after noticing that cyber attacks had become a “yeah, yeah” problem, as in, “Yeah, yeah, a lot of people have diabetes, there are things to manage it.” “The real moonshot, which is still several years away, is predicting and deflecting cyber attacks before they infiltrate an organization’s network,” Teller said in a blog post. This article first appeared in Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the top tech news.. Artificial intelligence already is a top topic at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Monday night, amid a driving blizzard that snarled traffic around town, I hosted a small dinner featuring Carnegie Mellon University’s Justine Cassell. She is associate dean of technology, strategy, and impact at the university’s school of computer science, and an expert on the human role in artificial intelligence. Cassell let loose the best one-liner I’ve heard that combats Elon Musk’s fear that the robots will kill us all. “If you’re afraid of the android revolution,” she said, “just stand in a puddle. The robot will electrocute itself.” (She added: If you can’t find a puddle, just stand still for 40 minutes, the robot will run out of electricity.) Tuesday morning I hosted another panel that featured the Stanford roboticist and machine-learning expert Fei-Fei Li. She is doing a stint at, working in its cloud business, and has admirably grasped the commercial aspects of her technical job quite well. She argues that “pre-data” companies can’t all of a sudden do AI themselves. The solution: Google Cloud, which would be happy to help. *** Speaking of companies who want to come up to speed digitally and otherwise, I’m pleased to announce that later this year Fortune will launch its newest conference, Brainstorm Reinvent. Think of it as the mirror image of Brainstorm Tech in Aspen., targets C-level executives in the industrial heartland, all of whom want to be on the right side of disruption. The founding sponsor of the event is McKinsey, the international consulting firm that’s keen to help non-tech-industry companies navigate these difficult straits. If you’d like to attend (or speak), drop me an email. *** Monday I noted that the backlash against the tech giants would be a preoccupation of at least Silicon Valley executives in Davos. In that vein, I highly recommend an engaging, erudite, cleverly written, and amusing in The Economist, “Silicon Valley, we have a problem.” Incidentally, of the three tech giants the article calls out the most for potential antitrust actions,,, and Google, only the latter two are in Davos in force. In the magazine’s next tier, has a Davos presence; and do not. *** Line of the day (so far) Rachel Botsman, author of: “Convenience is trumping trust.” This on a Davos panel with Google Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat (whose company gives away a ton of information in return for its users’ data) and Dara Khosrowshahi (whose company’s trustworthiness has plummeted). Scored its first-ever Academy Award for a feature film on Tuesday morning, as the streaming giant’s push to compete against traditional Hollywood studios on the industry’s most glitzy stage picked up steam. Netflix picked up four total Oscar nominations for its 2017 original film Mudbound, a drama set in the racially segregated U.S. South after World War II, including nods for the best adapted screenplay, cinematography, and original song (“Mighty River”) as well as a nomination for supporting actress Mary J. (And, one of those nominations even marked an Oscar-first: Rachel Morrison became the ever nominated for an Academy Award in that category.) Netflix won its first Academy Award, for the documentary short White Helmets, but this marks the first time the streaming service has ever had one of its original feature films nominated for an Oscar. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the latest batch of Oscar nominations early Tuesday morning. Netflix’s streaming rival,, received one Oscar nomination, for comedy The Big Sick‘s original screenplay, a year after the e-commerce giant won it’s for the drama Manchester by the Sea. Netflix also received three nominations in documentary film categories, including for Icarus and Strong Island in the Best Documentary Feature category, and for the documentary short Heroin(e). Meanwhile, Netflix foreign language film nominee On Body And Soul, from Hungary, in November and the film will debut on the streaming service next month., Fortune’s technology newsletter. Tuesday’s Oscar nominations are something of a culmination to what has already been a busy awards season for Netflix, which scored a dozen nominations at the for Mudbound and multiple original TV series, including Stranger Things and The Crown. However, in the end, Netflix walked away with only one Golden Globe win, for actor of the comedy series Master of None. So, while Mudbound has been a consistent nominee throughout Hollywood’s drawn-out awards season, the film has yet to take home any major hardware, which means Netflix may not actually get to hear the company’s name called on Oscars night. The Oscar winners will be revealed at the 90th Academy Awards on March 4. Given today’s and stratospheric returns of many, it is tempting to chase possible sky-high investments. Fear of missing out (FOMO) is real for most entrepreneurs. For many, it’s the late 1990s “dot com” boom all over again. There are scammers and charlatans all over the place during this Wild West phase and there is basically no regulation.. In the crypto-markets, it is buyer beware. But that is ok, because if you really want to profit from these technological innovations in the long run, your time may actually be better spent elsewhere. What is going on is the beginning of a critical change in how value is created and measured, made possible by the invention of blockchains, or perhaps more appropriately, distributed ledger technology (DLT). I had an opportunity to speak with Jeremy Epstein, CEO of and author of. Some venture capital investors consider Epstein to be a “modern day unicorn” because of what he accomplished as the VP of Marketing during his time at Sprinklr. Specifically, during his tenure, the company grew from a Series A $23mm valuation with 30 employees to a Series E valuation of $1 Billion dollars with 700+ employees in 10 countries, serving 800+ enterprise brands. Simply put, when a fellow marketer who helped grow a company to a valuation of over $1 Billion wants to talk about the future of technology, I listen and I take really good notes. A Quick Blockchain Primer Epstein explained the core innovation of bitcoin, supported by the Bitcoin blockchain, is that it solves the “” problem associated with digital technology. When you get paid, you need to trust that the asset you are obtaining in return for your product or service will have value in the future. If the other person in the transaction can easily make a copy of the asset, then yours will not be unique. As such, its value will be less. This is why it’s ok if we both have a picture of your dog or child, but it’s not ok if we both have the exact same $20 bill. So, by creating an immutable ledger, secured by a decentralized network, we all know who owns what at what time. This is what is called “consensus.” In this world, when a transaction occurs and you send.002 Bitcoin or Ether or any crypto-token to another person, the entire network is made aware of the fact that an asset has changed hands, so it cannot be used or “spent” again. There are some members of the network, called “miners,” who invest their time and money in the form of electricity and computing power, to verify that you have it in the first place and to ensure that, once you have signed the transaction with your private key, you no longer have it. Once they have completed the process, there is a mathematically elegant way for them to secure the network and distribute the information to others. For this work, they are rewarded with their own Bitcoins (or another token if they are using a different blockchain). The key thing here is that each coin that is created (also called a “token”) is digitally unique, cannot be forged, and has a clear, indisputable owner. If you have the, you own the coin. Assets and Value, Secured by the Blockchain The implication of all of this is that we now have a technology that can cost-effectively represent assets in a unique way. Since the assets are digital, they are fungible. You cannot own a fraction of a Picasso painting, but you can own.0000023 of the token that represents the Picasso painting. When you “tokenize” an asset and its uniqueness is undeniable, the asset has value. It may be large or small, but it is the only one of its kind in the world and that is worth something. Think about how many assets you currently have that are under-leveraged because the costs involved in buying, selling, or trading them are too high. This could include unused hard-disk space on your computer, bandwidth at your home that lays dormant during the day, or the family heirloom painting that you do not want to sell but could provide some liquidity. It’s possible that every asset will be “tokenized.” The second implication is that asset control will stay with the creator until she decides to part with it. In the future, companies will have to pay you for the data they get for free today such as name, email address, phone numbers, and social media profiles. If you are the company, the same will be true of those you serve. If you want control of an asset, whether it is for a marketing campaign or a data feed to improve your crops, you will have to buy or rent it from the owner. Finally, because these assets are digital, it means that they can be programmed, like a computer. The business and legal rules that currently surround an asset in the form of documents and contracts can be applied to the asset itself to govern its use. The three things you need to understand in order to prepare for the transformative power of Blockchains are: • Asset Tokenization in ever smaller increments • Asset Ownership that is clear and indisputable • Asset Programmability that can reduce transaction times Amidst all of the hype of crypto, these are the implications of blockchain’s arrival that are really going to change things up. It Won’t Be Here Tomorrow, But It Is Coming Blockchains are in their infancy and there are plenty of issues ranging from stability to security to interoperability, among others. The cryptocurrency craze is just a signal that the genie is officially out of the bottle. Whether you buy Bitcoin, Ether, Zcash, ARK or other tokens, is up to you. It may well be worth some of your time to understand them. The real value for you is to start looking at if every asset is tokenized, owned by its creator, and digitally programmable. These impacts are especially important if you are. Almost a year ago, to date, I convinced one of my closest friends,, to quit his job and join me on my crusade. I had left my job in just a few months prior, and was making a comfortable living as a freelance writer. He was about to finish getting his MBA, and verbally clear about his lack of excitement for what the future held: a high-paying cubicle job at a major company. “I want to build something,” he said. “You know, with employees. And financials. I don’t want to freelance–I want to build a company.” “Why won’t you take the leap with me, then?” I asked–dozens of times over. “With the money we’ve saved up, do you really think we won’t figure something out in a year?” 12 months later, and we’ve built a full-time team and successful company beyond our wildest dreams., a name that came from one of many apartment-balcony-and-coffee conversations, was our attempt to empower more of the world’s smartest people to share what they know. We work exclusively with carefully selected CEOs, serial entrepreneurs, investors and venture capitalists (primarily at the helm of businesses doing $10M to $300M in revenue) to share their hard-earned insight with the Internet. None of that atrocious writing PR firms peddle as acumen. None of the ad-speak and jargon nobody finds helpful. Just the hard lessons learned–and the personal stories of how these successful people learned those lessons the hard way. So, as a founder, I’d like to share some of the hard lessons I’ve learned over the past year, building Digital Press from ground zero. Lesson #1: You know nothing (and that’s okay). I was extremely, extremely fortunate to have had a mentor for years before taking the entrepreneurial leap. Friend and fellow Inc Columnist,, taught me more about life and business than I could have ever asked to learn on my own. But even after 4 years of mentorship, I can still admit that what I “knew” was still just theory. I hadn’t felt it yet. Before I took the leap, he told me, “When everything turns to chaos, as the founder, you have to bring the calm.” I didn’t understand what that meant until I started to feel the realities of building a company with other people’s livelihoods at stake. Entrepreneurship has humbled me. And I find it humbles a lot of young founders, who set off to change the world, only to feel the weight of their aspirations and realize it doesn’t happen overnight. All that theory means nothing until you’ve been in the trenches. So, be passionate. Set out to do something big. But remember, you won’t truly know until you can say, “I’ve been there.” Lesson #2: Entrepreneurship without personal development is a disaster. I’ll be completely honest: a year into real entrepreneurship and I am astounded at how little the business world talks about the value of personal development. I have done a lot in my 27 young years of being on this earth. I was a professional gamer as a teenager. I was a bodybuilder in college. But nothing, and I mean nothing, has tested me like entrepreneurship. It wears on you in ways I imagine fatherhood wears on a man. All throughout the year, I found myself in moments where I would hyper-focus on the business, lose sight of myself, and then things in my life would crumble. Personal relationships. Emotional well-being. Everything took a toll, all because I felt like my business was my child–and I would go whatever distance to see it succeed. This is unhealthy. And the moments you push too hard, you end up causing more damage than good. I know I will be an entrepreneur for the rest of my life. There’s no going back now. I am forever changed. But if there’s one thing I really hope to do for the entrepreneurial community along my journey, it’s start larger dialogues about the importance of personal development while building a business. If you lose yourself in the process, your company will suffer. Lesson #3: Cash is your gasoline. I feel extremely fortunate to have other successful business leaders in my life that have passed along words of wisdom. But one of the most important (and you learn this real fast as a startup founder) is the value of cash. I have always been frugal, but entrepreneurship made me see the money I had as so much more than just a “savings account.” Money started to have dozens of meanings: the ability to survive, the ability to innovate, the future of the company itself. Without cash, your company dies. Before we came up with the idea for Digital Press, we ate into our savings accounts. We helped each other cover our expenses. And the moment things clicked and we began to build a profitable business, we both shared the exact same mindset: “Keep as much cash in the company as possible.” I feel like this is one of those lessons you hear, and can even understand on a theoretical level, but it’s not until you start adding employees and see your monthly payroll go up and up, that you truly understand. Cash is your gasoline. And you don’t want to find yourself on the open road on an empty tank. Lesson #4: The burden of opportunity is a real burden. A good problem to have–but a problem nonetheless. As an entrepreneur, one of the worst things you can do is chase too many rabbits at once. I have struggled with this through every aspect of my life, because when you’re curious about the world you want to explore it all. Part of what allows a business to flourish, especially in record time, is simplicity. As another mentor of mine,, would tell me: “Simplicity is velocity.” The moments we tried to build in too many directions at once, we failed. We overworked ourselves. We got burned out, even discouraged. But the times we were able to focus on improving one or two things at a time, we flew. This is a lesson that fundamentally changed how I think about, not just business, but every pursuit in life. One thing at a time. Lesson #5: Entrepreneurship is lonely. Since not very many other people seem to want to admit this, I guess I will. Entrepreneurship is lonely. Nobody will ever know how hard you work at what you do. Nobody will give you the acknowledgment or the “pat on the back” you feel you deserve. Nobody will sit there, cheering you on, day in and day out. Nobody else will take the fall when you mess up. Nobody will be able to tell you which direction is right or wrong. Entrepreneurship is lonely because, by definition, entrepreneurship means choosing to go “your own way.” This took me a while to really accept, and also emotionally address within myself. Not only will your efforts go unacknowledged by the vast majority of people in your life (at least, to the degree you’re expecting to be acknowledged), but at every step you are going to feel like you’re letting someone down. If you aren’t letting your significant other down because you’ve been working for 17 straight hours, then you’re letting your friend down for not calling them back, and you’re letting your co-founder down by not responding to an issue fast enough, and you’re letting your employees down by not getting them what they need that day–and you’re letting yourself down for not being able to do it all. This is one of the hardest, most brutal truths about entrepreneurship: In the process of trying to be great, you will fail at almost everything. And do you know what? Because at the end of the day, all you can do is your best–and then wake up the next day and try again, and again, and again. And Twitter both revealed on Friday more about how they plan to deal with the spread of fake news and propaganda on their services. Facebook said that it would ask its users to tell it which news sources they read and trust to help it decide which ones should be featured more prominently. These responses will help “shift the balance of news you see towards sources that are determined to be trusted by the community,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained in a Facebook post. Meanwhile, Twitter said in a blog post that it would email nearly 678,000 users that may have inadvertently interacted with now-suspended accounts believed to have been linked to a Russian propaganda outfit called the Internet Research Agency (IRA). The announcements come amid intense scrutiny by U.S. Lawmakers over both Facebook and Twitter’s role in letting Russians and others spread during the 2016 presidential election. The goal, according to U.S. Intelligence agencies, was to divide Americans on politically charged issues like race, religion, and gun control. Zuckerberg announced the Facebook news just days after his company said it would to show users more family-friendly posts from friends or acquaintances that Facebook believes will spur more user interaction. “There’s too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world today,” Zuckerberg said about the polling of users about the sites they have confidence in. “Social media enables people to spread information faster than ever before, and if we don’t specifically tackle these problems, then we end up amplifying them.” He added: “This update will not change the amount of news you see on Facebook. It will only shift the balance of news you see towards sources that are determined to be trusted by the community.” It’s unclear how Facebook’s shift will solve the problem of so-called filter bubbles, in which people only see information that aligns with their existing beliefs. Some raised the possibility that crowd sourcing the list of credible news outlets could be manipulated., Fortune’s technology newsletter. For its part, Twitter minimized the impact of the Russian-linked accounts, saying that they merely represented “two one-hundredths of a percent (0.016%) of the total accounts on Twitter at the time.” “However, any such activity represents a challenge to democratic societies everywhere, and we’re committed to continuing to work on this important issue,” Twitter said. Twitter has said that it had discovered 3,814 IRA-connected accounts in total, including 1,062 accounts that it uncovered just recently. It said it had also identified 50,258 bot accounts linked to the Russian government that spread misinformation during the 2016 election, including 13,512 accounts found just recently. (Reuters) – Data center computers with Intel Corp’s ( ) newer chips might reboot more often than normal because of problems with the patches issued to fix the so-called Spectre and Meltdown security flaws, the company said on Wednesday. Intel confirmed that patches for the security flaws can cause higher-than-expected reboot rates in Ivy Bridge, Sandy Bridge, Skylake and Kaby Lake processors, said Navin Shenoy, general manager of the data center group, in a statement on Intel’s website. The Kaby Lake chips are the company’s most recent offering. Last week, Intel said it had received reports that its security patches were causing problems in systems with its older Broadwell and Haswell chips. Shenoy said that Intel had issued patches for 90 percent of Intel chips released in the past five years but that the company had “more work to do.” He also said the company would send out initial versions of fixes for the buggy patches to customers by next week. “We have reproduced these issues internally and are making progress toward identifying the root cause,” Shenoy wrote. 3 Intel confirmed that the Spectre and Meltdown flaws affected its chips, potentially letting hackers steal information believed to be very secure. The Spectre flaw affected nearly every modern computing device, including those with chips from Intel, Advanced Micro Devices Inc ( ) and ARM Holdings. Intel on Wednesday also quantified how much of a performance hit the patches cause for data center customers. For common tasks such as running website servers, the patches caused a 2 percent slowdown, Intel said. Another test that simulated online transactions at a stock brokerage showed a 4 percent slowdown, the company said. For some types for work involving servers that store large amounts of data and try to retrieve it quickly, the company said the slowdown could be as severe as 18 percent to 25 percent. However, it wasn’t immediately clear how common those situations were. Tesla’s () all-electric Model 3 sedan is receiving glowing reviews. The Drive’s Alex Roy spent 50 hours with the car over four days and had to say: “it’s far more than a car. It’s a work of art, a concept car come to life, more revelatory than the Model S, and historically even more important. “ and echoed the view that the Model 3 is a unique car — futuristic and exciting. Called it an “unexpected delight” to drive. Called it “magic.” But here’s the kicker: the base model of the Model 3, priced at $35,000, is to have an unsubsidized five-year total cost of ownership only $4,200, or 13% more than a base model Toyota () Camry. For over a decade, the Camry has been the in the United States. The Camry is generally regarded as a utilitarian vehicle rather than “magic” or a “work of art.” Photo. The Model 3’s unprecedentedly low total cost of ownership In my somewhat subjective estimation — backed up by several impartial car reviewers — the Model 3 offers greater quality than an ordinary entry-level luxury car like the BMW () 3 Series at a total cost of ownership not far from a utilitarian, mass market car like the Toyota Camry. This is an unprecedented level of price performance. Total cost of ownership includes the full costs of owning a vehicle, including energy costs (i.e. Electricity or gasoline), service and maintenance, and insurance. It’s a better apples-to-apples comparison of the cost of an electric car vs. A gasoline car than sticker price due to the considerably lower costs of running an electric vehicle. The to the Toyota Camry comes from Loup Ventures partner Gene Munster, known for betting on Apple () as an analyst at Piper Jaffray. Another comparison by YouTubers produces similar results. They compare the Model 3 to the Honda () Civic. They find that the unsubsidized five-year total cost of ownership for the Model 3 is only $3,400 or 14% higher than for the Honda Civic, a much more utilitarian car. They also compare the Model 3 to the BMW 330i, a car with a similar level of luxury, at best equal driving performance, and inferior technology. They estimate the 330i’s total cost of ownership at $17,450 higher than the Model 3s. That’s 62% higher for a car that is about the same or worse. Two Bit da Vinci notes that beyond their fifth year, the maintenance cost for gasoline cars increases significantly with several parts requiring replacement. Not so for electric cars. Over a seven-year or eight-year timeframe, the cost comparison is likely even more favorable to the Model 3. A newer gasoline car can survive for before it needs to be scrapped. Data from the Tesla Model S shows that an electric car can drive with minimal battery degradation. One taxi driver drove in his Model S and lost only 7% of his original battery life. Based on this data, electric cars are expected to have much longer lifetimes than gasoline cars, perhaps as much as 500,000 miles. This makes the total cost of ownership comparison extremely favorable over a 15-year timeframe. After 15 years, a Model 3 may still be running smoothly while a gasoline car is long gone. The same goes for cases of high utilization such as taxis or ride-hailing services. Looking ahead to autonomous ride-hailing, self-driving electric cars will savagely outcompete self-driving gasoline cars. Low cost of ownership means high sales The Model 3 offers a BMW-like experience for a Toyota Camry-like cost. For this reason, I believe that demand for the Model 3 will be like nothing the automotive industry has seen in recent decades. Research that consumers are responsive to the total cost of ownership of vehicles, not just sticker price. Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya that BMW 3 Series sales will be decimated by the Model 3. Gene Munster that Tesla could sell 2.75 million Model 3s per year by 2025. I don’t know if these predictions are correct, but they are certainly not unreasonable given the unprecedented level of price-performance the Model 3 offers. Many consumers will wonder why they would want to buy any other car. Some analysts are gravely underestimating the level of consumer enthusiasm specifically for this car, and not for lackluster electric compliance cars like GM’s () Chevy Bolt or future me-too offerings. Tesla has in software, design, and battery pack economies of scale that competitors show no signs of overcoming. Most recently, Tesla stores in San Francisco and LA were when the first Model 3s were put on display. Some waited over an hour in line just to see the car up-close for a few minutes. This did not occur for the Chevy Bolt, or any other car in memory for that matter. The best advertising for the Model 3 will be knowing someone who drives one, especially someone as enthusiastic as the people who held a reservation as of August 2. I expect that demand will greatly increase over time as more people learn about the car. Another factor driving increased demand will be the development of Enhanced Autopilot and more advanced autonomy features. Revenue and market cap implications If Gene Munster is correct in his speculation that Tesla will sell 2.75 million Model 3s per year by 2025, the company will generate $105 billion in annual revenue from that one vehicle alone. Assuming an equal amount of revenue from the Model Y crossover, that would be $210 billion between the two vehicles, plus for the Model S and X. At an auto industry average price/sales ratio, $219 billion in revenue would yield a market cap of $114 billion, up 42% from September’s all-time high of $65.5 billion. At an S&P 500 historical average price/sales ratio, Tesla’s market cap would be $322 billion. That’s an increase of over 490% from the all-time high. Remember, these calculations exclude revenue from all other vehicles and lines of business, including solar and energy storage. I think the 2025 timeframe is too long for two reasons. First, by 2025 there is a good chance that autonomous ride-hailing will affect overall vehicle demand in a way that Munster is not accounting for. Second, it doesn’t help us to think about what sales will be like in the Model 3s first few years on the market. What factors prevent sales from reaching 2.75 million per year in three years, rather than in seven? The bottom line is that although it is difficult to predict the future in much detail, I can say with high confidence that the Model 3 will break sales records as soon as the limiting factor is demand, not production. Once production ramps to meet demand, I would be surprised if it is not the best-selling sedan in the United States. An alternative way to model future revenue and market cap is through the autonomous ride-hailing business. Suppose Tesla produces just 5 million cars with self-driving hardware over the seven years from 2018 to 2025, an average production of 714,000 cars per year. Suppose that each self-driving vehicle conventional vehicles. Given 1-2 billion passenger vehicles on the road globally (estimates vary widely), that means there is a need for a 200 million to 400 million self-driving vehicles. 5 million cars would be only a 1.25% to 2.5% share of the eventual install base. I’m assuming that each self-driving car will replace of five people, putting average annual paid miles per vehicle at 82,750. Using ARK Invest’s estimated price of, that’s about $29,000 in revenue per vehicle per year. Assuming the same net margin on this revenue as the taxi and limousine industry’s, that’s about $9,000 in net profit per car per year. Across 5 million cars, that comes to about $45 billion in annual net profit. The historical price/earnings ratio of the S&P 500 is. At this ratio, $45 billion in earnings would yield a market cap of $706 billion. That’s over 10x growth from Tesla’s all-time high. Conclusion The main obstacle to the Model 3 achieving a high sales volume is achieving a high production volume. Product risk is low and execution risk is moderate or high. In my view, Tesla is unlikely to run out of cash due to its large cash balance ($3.5 billion as of the end of Q3), improving cash flow from Model 3 production, and its proven historical ability to raise funds in a second offering when needed. Motor Trend the Model 3 “the most important vehicle of the century.” Many observers fail to see what is new about the Model 3. It’s not just another electric car like the Chevy Bolt. It’s not just another entry-level luxury car like the BMW 330i. It’s a breakthrough in price-performance that will generate unprecedented consumer interest, and that breakthrough will be hard for competitors to replicate. Disclosure: I am/we are long TSLA. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article. The initial public offering of Spotify, the music-streaming service, is almost here. What is expected to be the largest tech IPO of 2018—it’s certainly the most anticipated—will likely take place in late March or April. Spotify plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange—but there’s a catch. Instead of a traditional IPO that makes shares available to the general public, Stockholm-based Spotify will opt to, making its shares available only to institutional investors and eliminating the need for underwriters, a.k.a. The banks that set an initial price, connect sellers and buyers, and provide the cash necessary to stabilize the stock. Some people have already called it a “non-IPO.” The move could. IPOs are usually a lucrative business for investment banks, but in the last few years revenues from equity capital market (ECM) fees have dropped. Spotify paid just $30 million in ECM fees to three banks: Inc., and Allen & Co. Those institutions will perform some of the traditional tasks expected of them, but in a less prominent way. Why the novel strategy? Spotify can buck tradition because, though it’s not yet turning a profit, it is earning cash, and it is not planning on raising more revenue from investors. Spotify, as measured by either its subscription service or its ad-supported free version, is the most popular music streaming service, according to the. Say it’s a good time for Spotify to go public. The company has 60 million paying subscribers, just renegotiated long-term licensing deals with three major record labels, and is valued at about $15 billion. (It is, however, facing a copyright suit from Wixen Music Publishing, filed in late December 2017.) The Wall Street Journal says that due to other companies’ need for cash, “it is far from guaranteed” that more will follow Spotify’s lead. However, according to, Spotify “could create a new model for growth companies in which they raise all their money in private markets and do all their trading in public ones, with some small variations.” Whatever the case, Wall Street will be watching. Recently, I went through the process of choosing a new SaaS product for my agency (out of respect for all involved, I’m keeping the name of the company and the kind of product they sell confidential). I researched several providers and talked to sales reps from each – this was a big-ticket purchase, so I wanted to be sure I had as much information as possible. After a few weeks, I thought I’d made the right decision. The problems started shortly after. My support tickets took an average of 3-5 days to get a response. I couldn’t get emails back from my “dedicated” account rep (who then bailed on one of our two hour-long onboarding calls and never responded to my requests for an update). I felt let down. The product itself may have been the right solution for our needs, but the poor onboarding support I received left me with so much post-purchase regret that I wound up cancelling the contract and moving to a different provider. The sale was lost, and it had nothing to do with the salespeople involved. Why Selling Shouldn’t Stop at the Close To be clear, I’m not talking about the trap of overselling – of continuing to pitch your product’s features and benefits after your prospect has agreed to buy. As Nick Kane of the Janek Performance Group: “What this tells your customer is that you don’t ‘get’ them. Not only is this sales mentality out of date, it’s also one of the easiest ways to turn off your customer – and worse yet – risk losing any future sales opportunities.” Instead, what I’m arguing is that, after the close, customer relationships shouldn’t be thought of as “done.” Closing a sale doesn’t guarantee a happy customer – let alone one who’s going to go on to refer your company to others. A full lifecycle program of sales needs to take two factors into consideration: proper onboarding, and the conversion of customers into advocates. Onboarding As Sales I’d argue that onboarding – the activities taken after a purchase to get new customers up to speed – should be treated as part of the sales process. Too many salespeople “pass the buck” after the deal is done, assuming that account reps, customer service or other pre-established funnels will help customers get from the point of purchase to the initial “aha moment.” This ignores the fact that, during the post-purchase period, new customers are – consciously and subconsciously – evaluating whether or not they made the right choice. Research by Seung Hwan Lee and June Cotte of the University of Western Ontario, Canada, published by the, suggests that there are actually four distinct types of post-purchase consumer regret: • Regret due to foregone alternatives (e.g. Regret that one alternative was chosen over another) • Regret due to a change in significance (e.g. Regret that the impact of the chosen solution isn’t as significant as expected) • Regret due to under-consideration (e.g. Regret that too little time was invested in choosing between alternatives) • Regret due to over-consideration (e.g. Regret that too much time was put into the decision-making process) A poor onboarding experience can contribute to the first two types of post-purchase regret, which Lee and Cotte describe as “outcome regret” (versus “process regret”). • If customers aren’t trained appropriately or brought up to speed quickly, they may believe that a different alternative would have led to better results. • Similarly, if they aren’t shown how to quickly get value from their purchase, they may view its overall significance as being less than its actual potential. If post-purchase regret is left unaddressed, both of these scenarios can lead to cancellations and refund requests (as in the case of the SaaS purchase I described earlier). Even if money isn’t lost as the result of poor onboarding, it’s missed indirectly when would-be happy customers aren’t converted into advocates for your company. Selling the Referral Brian Williams Ph.D. Of The Brevet Group: • Salespeople who actively seek out and exploit referrals earn 4 to 5 times more than those who don’t. • 91% of customers say they’d give referrals. Only 11% of salespeople ask for referrals. Basically, salespeople and the companies they work for benefit financially from referrals. But while most people are willing to give them, they’re rarely asked to. That’s an even bigger problem when you consider that “people are 4 times more likely to buy when referred by a friend.” “Referrals” can take a number of different forms, including everything from asking satisfied customers for referrals to others who would benefit, to a formally-structured peer-to-peer referral program like. As the citizens of Hawaii came out of hiding in their bathtubs and basements Saturday morning, after learning that the emergency alert they had received, warning of an imminent nuclear missile attack, was a false alarm, their fear and panic transformed into rage. “I’m extremely angry right now. People should lose their jobs if this was an error,” Hawaii State Representative Matt Lopresti told CNN. Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz on Twitter that the, which said that a ballistic missile was inbound to Hawaii and urged people to seek shelter, was sent due to “human error.” The initial alert went out at 8:07 am, but it wasn’t until 8:43 am that the state sent a second alert, announcing it was a false alarm. Governor David Ige, “An employee pushed the wrong button.” Could it really be that the emergency alert system is so simplistic, it only takes the twitch of a finger to send Hawaii into terror and chaos? Photo courtesy Ashley Shaffer Yes. During a press conference Saturday afternoon, the governor and officials at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency confirmed that the blunder occurred during a twice-daily test that happens when staffers switch shifts. In this case, the staffer accidentally selected a live alert, instead of a test alert. After the alert went out, there was no way to automatically cancel or recall the message. Instead, they took to Twitter to tell the public the alert was a false alarm, but it took a full 38 minutes to manually generate and disseminate another corrective emergency alert that reached all Hawaiians. Officials said they’re now working on speeding up that feature. 1 “We’ve already implemented some actions to speed up the process so the public would be notified faster,” Ige said. The Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, or IPAWS, manages both the emergency alerts you get on your phone and the national emergency alert system, which broadcasts to television stations. According to Retired Admiral David Simpson, former chief of the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, the system uses a web interface with multiple servers that cache preloaded messages about different types of emergencies, from states across the country. “It’s a regular PC interface. This person probably had a mouse and a dropdown menu of the kind of alert messages you can send,” and selected the wrong one, Simpson says. In a statement to WIRED, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which operates IPAWS, said it is working with local authorities and the FCC to gather “more details to understand how this occurred and how to prevent such occurrences in the future.” FCC chairman Ajit Pai tweeted that the commission is investigating as well. Those pre-loaded emergency alerts, scary as they may seem, are necessary, says Thomas Karako, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It’s critical we have this kind of early warning system.” Simpson agrees: “You don’t want to be in the middle of a attack on the US and have someone fumbling around with the message.” It’s also natural to conduct exercises to ensure the system is functioning. The problem in this case, Simpson says, is any exercise message should begin with the words, “EXERCISE EXERCISE EXERCISE.” “This was probably a state-run emergency exercise that doesn’t have the strong controls that DoD has learned the hard way from 50 years of screwing up,” Simpson says. Where Were the Feds? In the event of an actual attack, the first government agency to initiate an alert would be the North American Air Defense Command, or NORAD, which is located in a cave in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado Springs. Open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, its staffers—known as watch standers—monitor a global network of sensors that can detect a missile launch. If it detects a missile en route to Hawaii, NORAD would send a message to Pacific Command, which would in turn alert the state emergency management center. That’s why, says Simpson, the biggest question of all may be what the federal government was doing after the alert went out. The Emergency Alert System, which predated Wireless Emergency Alerts, was created with the specific goal of letting the president communicate with the country in the event of a nuclear attack. The US has spent billions of dollars maintaining this system, and yet, 38 minutes went by before Hawaii sent a second message, acknowledging the false alarm. The president, or any of the federal agencies with access to the emergency alert system, could have corrected the record much sooner. “We paid big bucks to the DoD and provide very good capabilities to the president to communicate directly to the nation. Where’s the accountability there for not piping up immediately?” Simpson says. “I think that’s going to wind up ultimately being the scandal. Where were they with all of this?” In a statement Saturday afternoon, White House deputy press secretary Lindsay Walters put the blame on Hawaii. “The President has been briefed on the state of Hawaii’s emergency management exercise. This was purely a state exercise.” While numerous questions remain about the federal government’s response, Hawaii’s excruciatingly long panic sends several clear messages about ways to improve IPAWS. Though all 50 states use it, not all local governments are part of the voluntary system, leaving some cities without a uniform way to alert their citizens of a local threat. And it’s possible not all emergency management centers are giving their staffers uniform, adequate training. In some cases, Simpson says, those emergency centers only staff up when a threat appears imminent. “There’s nowhere near the professionalism there on the national security side of things,” Simpson says. Perhaps the most critical issue this false alarm highlights is the need for a firewall between the test mode and live mode in the emergency response interface. In the DoD’s version of the system, Simpson says, that separation exists. It appears that was not the case in Hawaii. The Hawaii emergency management officials also noted the obvious need for a better way to recall accidental messages. As terrifying as this false alarm may have been, experts say it’s critical for governments to continue to test these systems so that they’re adequately prepared if and when the time comes to use them. During the wildfires in California last year, several counties for fear of sowing panic, and instead, left their citizens wholly unprepared for the fires’ spread. “My big fear is this has been such a bad experience states will be afraid to use alerting now. But the opposite should occur. They should get in and conduct tests and exercises,” Simpson says. “But do so using the right controls.” Louise Matsakis contributed reporting. 1Story updated at 18:45 ET on Saturday, January 13 to include information from the press conference. SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China’s cyber watchdog has scolded Ant Financial, Alibaba’s payment affiliate, for compromising user privacy after many users of its Alipay service were automatically enrolled in its credit scoring system. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said in a statement it had summoned Ant Financial representatives to a meeting last Saturday and told them they had failed to meet the country’s personal information security standards. The rap over the knuckles adds to a tough start to the year for Ant Financial [ANTFIN.UL] which was recently blocked by U.S. Regulators from acquiring MoneyGram International Inc. It is also grappling with new regulations, requiring mobile payment firms to sharply increase the amount of client funds in interest-free reserve accounts, which will likely reduce profits. Alipay has a popular end-of-year feature that allows its customers to analyze how they have spent their money over the year. At the end of 2017, the feature began enrolling users who wanted to look at their bills into the credit scoring system, Sesame Credit. That allowed Sesame Credit to collect their data and share the analysis with its partners. Users could only opt out if they unchecked a button on the feature’s landing page. Sesame Credit apologized last week and canceled the default option. CAC said the company should “step up efforts to conduct a comprehensive investigation of the Alipay platform, carry out special rectifications and take effective measures to prevent similar incidents from recurring.” It quoted Alipay and Sesame Credit as saying that they had learned a “profound lesson” from the incident. Ant Financial did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Samsung is going all in on the Internet of things, betting that connected appliances and faster Internet speeds will result in happier customers. Executives for the electronics giant, speaking at the 2018 CES technology show in Las Vegas on Monday, reconfirmed a vow made two years ago that all of the company’s products will be IOT-compatible by 2020—adding that 90% already are as of today. And it plans to use its existing SmartThings app to ensure that those devices can all talk to each other—from the TV to the phone to the refrigerator to the washing machine. Samsung promised that the initiative would debut in the spring. What that means for users will depend on which Samsung appliances they own, of course. One example is people who buy a new Samsung TV will no longer have to worry about entering user names and passwords for services like, Hulu, and Spotify when they initially set up their TVs. That information will automatically entered into the TV by checking other systems in which the customer is logged in, making it a more seamless experience. TV sets will also have personalized recommendations for movies and shows, based on a user’s overall viewing habits on all their devices. TVs will also include Bixby, Samsung’s voice-controlled digital assistant, and will be able to double as a central hub for smart products around the home, letting users do everything from see who is at the front door to adjust the thermostat. The goal of the push, says Tom Baxter, president and CEO of Samsung’s North American division is to create an “eco-system of devices working together to produce unique experiences.” As part of the initiative, Samsung will expand the number of smart refrigerator models it sells by introducing 14 new models that come with its integrated screen and newly expanded FamilyHub technology that lets owners stream music, leave notes to each other, and view the contents of the fridge in real time. Through Bixby, the FamilyHub will differentiate between users’ based on their voices and give custom information to them, such as their schedule for the day or commute times to school or work. “IOT is still frustrating to a lot of people, but it doesn’t need to be,” said Yoon Lee, senior vice president at Samsung Electronics. Samsung’s not stopping with its own products, either. The company is working closely with the Open Connectivity Forum, the world’s largest IOT standardization body, to have all SmartThings-compatible products work with the app. And the company said it has signed an agreement with a “leading European auto manufacturer” to extend this IOT integration to vehicles (letting, for instance, people check if they’re out of milk as they drive by the store). Samsung has previously tried and failed to make its ecosystem more connected. To ensure this effort is more successful, Baxter said, the company has invested $14 billion in research and development over the past year. Between 100 and 250 company bicycles are stolen from Google’s campus every week, out of a fleet of around 1,100 so-called Gbikes. Or maybe ‘borrowed’ is a better word than ‘stolen’ – it’s complicated. According to the, the bikes wind up in odd places, like schools, tavern roofs, and Burning Man. The people who take them are often residents of Mountain View, the town that’s home to Google’s headquarters. They often view the bikes as a kind of community service, even though they’re ostensibly meant for Google employees to use on the Google campus. Google has been trying to control its losses, using roving teams to collect the bikes from around town, and recently installing GPS trackers. That’s how they learned one had made it all the way to the Burning Man festival in Nevada., Fortune’s technology newsletter. But according to comments to the Journal from Mountain View residents, the deeper issue may be mixed feelings about the corporate giant. Some locals didn’t realize the bikes were supposed to be for Google employees only, suggesting they regard Google as a benevolent part of the community. But others – perhaps including a man who claimed to have an entire garage full of the bikes – regard their borrowing as a kind of retributive justice against the massive company. One woman specifically cited the annoyance of Google Buses, which bring employees to work from around the San Francisco Bay, saying she borrowed the bikes to “balance it out.” The Google buses have been the in San Francisco, as a kind of proxy for income inequality and rising rents that have been blamed on the tech boom. The bike situation is subtler and more complex, as befitting lower-key Mountain View. But it still reflects, in the words of one local speaking to the Journal, a sense among residents that “Google owes them somehow, someway.”. (Reuters) – Apple Inc will release a patch for the Safari web browser on its iPhones, iPads and Macs within days, it said on Thursday, after major chipmakers disclosed flaws that leave nearly every modern computing device vulnerable to hackers. On Wednesday, Alphabet Inc’s Google and other security researchers disclosed two major chip flaws, one called Meltdown affecting only Intel Corp chips and one called Spectre affecting nearly all computer chips made in the last decade. The news sparked a sell-off in Intel’s stock as investors tried to gauge the costs to the chipmaker. In a statement on its website, Apple said all Mac and iOS devices are affected by both Meltdown and Spectre. But the most recent operating system updates for Mac computers, Apple TVs, iPhones and iPads protect users against the Meltdown attack and do not slow down the devices, it added, and Meltdown does not affect the Apple Watch. Macs and iOS devices are vulnerable to Spectre attacks through code that can run in web browsers. Apple said it would issue a patch to its Safari web browser for those devices “in the coming days.” Shortly after the researchers disclosed the chip flaws Wednesday, Google and Microsoft Corp released statements telling users which of their products were affected. Google said its users of Android phones – more than 80 percent of the global market – were protected if they had the latest security updates. Apple remained silent for more than a day about the fate of the hundreds of millions of users of its iPhones and iPads. Ben Johnson, co-founder and chief strategist for cyber security firm Carbon Black, said the delay in updating customers about whether Apple’s devices are at risk could affect Apple’s drive to get more business customers to adopt its hardware. “Something this severe gets the attention of all the employees and executives at a company, and when they go asking the IT and security people about it and security doesn’t have an answer for iPhones and iPads, it just doesn’t give a whole lot of confidence,” Johnson said. Peter Thiel and his venture capital firm, Founders Fund, are big believers in Bitcoin. The PayPal co-founder and other Founders Fund partners bought $15 million to $20 million worth of the that’s now worth hundreds of millions of dollars, according to a Wall Street Journal on Tuesday that cites unnamed sources. The report didn’t say exactly when Thiel or his VC firm first bought Bitcoin, whose value has from to dramatic in recent months. The volatility has alarmed some economists, who worry of a. Thiel and the Founders Fund, however, don’t appear to share those concerns, and are instead pitching Bitcoin to their investors as “a high-risk, high-reward wager similar to its other venture bets,” the report said., Fortune’s technology newsletter. Shares of Bitcoin jumped over 13% on Tuesday from $13,412 to $15,216 after the report, according to. In October, Thiel said during an investment conference in Saudi Arabia that people are “underestimating” Bitcoin and he compared the cryptocurrency to gold. “If bitcoin ends up being the cyber equivalent of gold it has a great potential left,” he said at the time. About other cryptocurrencies, however, Thiel said he was “skeptical of most of them.” Other cryptocurrencies include, Ethereum, and Litecoin. Fortune contacted Founders Fund and will update this story if it responds. The, parent company of Sears and Kmart, made a truly unorthodox decision this holiday season. The retailer, which generates the vast majority of its dwindling sales from in-store foot traffic, didn’t run any television advertisements for most of the crucial holiday shopping season. According to the, no paid Sears commercials have run nationally since November 25th. No national Kmart commercials have run since November 24th. The decision, according to the Journal, came from Sears Holdings chief Edward Lampert, over the objections of other executives. Lampert has championed a shift to digital marketing, even as Sears’ overall advertising spending has declined along with the company. In a statement to the Journal, Sears said the shift came after evaluating the effectiveness of its various marketing efforts. Even in the digital age, abandoning TV entirely would be a highly unusual move for any large consumer business. While TV advertising expenditures have declined across the economy, they still makes up more than. Studies have also found that ads on television are still substantially than those in other media., Fortune’s technology newsletter. The decision is particularly strange in the case of Sears, whose customers. Americans over 44 watch traditional television than younger people, with those over 65 watching nearly three times as much television as those 18-24, according to eMarketer. Sears, a venerable U.S. Institution that was once, has been in for years now. For a time, that decline could be seen as a product of the shift from brick-and-mortar to online shopping. But Sears has lagged even other legacy department stores in reacting to that transition. While department stores as a category now generate online, eMarketer says that ecommerce generates of Sears’ revenue. Focusing on digital ads might be seen as an effort to move that needle. But it could also be seen as throwing marketing budget at a service that customers just don’t like, while ignoring what still (maybe, just barely) works. Meanwhile, retailers from to to Urban Outfitters have recently, and at outlets including WalMart is driving talk of a. Sears, it seems, no longer has anyone but itself, and its leaderships’ decisions, to blame for its problems. It’s New Year’s Eve 2017, and people are saying, “Out with the old and in with the new.” If you’re one of the on their cable television this past year, you might find yourself unable to watch the 2018 countdown. But you don’t need cable to watch the ball drop in New York City or to see Mariah Carey make her on ABC. That’s because 2017 was finally the year streaming television arrived. Here’s how to live stream the New Year’s Eve countdown and ball drop for free — for auld lang syne. DirecTV Now You can watch Ryan Seacrest host ‘New Year’s Rockin’ Eve’ — and a whole lot more — using ‘s free seven-day free trial. The service costs $35 per month for a package of at least 60 live channels after the trial ends, but that stretch can get you in on should help you through the holiday and more. DirecTV Now’s basic-level plan packs local affiliates for, FOX, and NBC. But before you sign up,, because not every market includes every station. Hulu with Live TV FOX’s New Year’s Eve coverage is hosted by Steve Harvey this year, and you can catch it on which also offers CBS and NBC. The service also packs a big on-demand library, which could be good if you get bored of all that confetti and kissing and you just want to binge, instead. Like DirecTV Now, Hulu with Live TV is free for a week, but it runs $39 per month after the trial is up. One nice thing about Hulu’s offering is that it has an option to add on a cloud DVR service, which might be a smart long-run investment if you want to keep the service for 2018 and beyond. Sling TV Depending upon which television channel you want to ring in the new year with, might be the choice for you. The service also offers a seven-day free preview as well as Univision and FOX, but you can only get those channels and on its higher-tiered “Blue” plan, which costs $25 per month after the trial. If you want to watch CNN’s Anderson Cooper count it down, Sling’s lower tiered “Orange” plan costs just $20 per month, and offers the cable news giant, but it doesn’t have the local networks. But while Sling TV Blue does have the NFL Network, so it might be a worthwhile investment, if you’re going to watch all the games on Sunday before the festivities begin. PlayStation Vue If you’ve got a PlayStation 4 under your TV, might be a good choice for you. The live streaming television service offers a five-day free trial and starts at $39 per month after the promotional period ends. The base plan caters to popular live programming (other packages focus on sports and movies), so that’s probably a safe bet for streaming New Year’s programming. But like the others, channels vary by zip code, so before you sign up. YouTube TV Google’s isn’t just a portal to its popular video-hosting website. It is also a live streaming television service that offers a seven-day free trial with 40 channels and cloud DVR capability for $35 per month (once the promotion ends). YouTube TV includes all the major networks, including CBS, FOX, and NBC — where host Carson Daly does his yearly thing — but the catch the service only available in select markets (though, there are ). I’m one of those people who takes time at the new year to define personal objectives for the forthcoming year, some of which I actually achieve. Enterprise IT should be doing the same thing for cloud computing. Here are my three suggestions for IT’s cloud resolutions for 2018. 2018 cloud resolution No. 1: Look at your cloud security approach and technology When I find issues with enterprise cloud deployments in my consulting work, it’s most often around security. Clients often leave aspects of their cloud deployments unprotected or underprotected, and things that should be encrypted are not, while things that should not be encrypted are. While I’m not recommending that you gut your cloud security and replace it with what’s cool and new, I am recommending that you take some time to walk through the security solution architecture and ask yourself about where you can improve. Moreover, consider all the security technology in place, what needs to be updated? What should be replaced? 2018 cloud resolution No. 2: Look at your cloud training plan There are two categories of cloud training: • Provider training that’s focused on a specific provider such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, or Google. • General training that provides a good overview of how to make cloud work in enterprises, and all that is involved with that. You should have a mix of both, as well as some paths for your staff defined to get the skills of a cloud architect, cloud developer, cloud operations specialist, and cloud devops specialist, just to name a few roles. There should be training paths through both vendor and nonvendor courses to get your staff members the skills they need to perform their duties (which of course must be clearly defined). 2018 cloud resolution No. 3: Evaluate your databases Databases are sticky, and once enterprises have used a specific database, they are not likely to change it. Indeed, what many enterprises have done is just rehost their data on public clouds using the same database they used on premises. Today we have many options in the cloud, including SQL and non-SQL databases. While there are native databases in public clouds such as AWS’s RedShift and, there are many other options from databases providers that support the public cloud and traditional platforms. Are you using the optimal solution? These are just a few suggestions; I suspect that you can name more. Whatever they are, pick a few and follow up. Have a great new year! I hate loving General Electric (GE), its like an ex boyfriend/girlfriend that broke your heart. Each time you go back, you tell yourself it will be different they have changed! Yet every time you go back, they break your heart again. This has now happened to me twice with GE. In 2008, I was riding high, having bought GE in the mid 20’s in 2004, with the promise of an industrial revolution. The finance division was booming and I was up a cool 50% and thought I had found the one! Then I found out they were cheating on me with someone named subprime! It nearly bankrupted the company, and Uncle Warren had to come to the rescue to save it. I was frankly, lucky to get out when I did, selling mid panic in the low 20’s. The end result was a 4 year investment that returned roughly negative 20%. I vowed to never make that mistake again In early 2015, it was as if GE sent me a text saying “I miss you lets get lunch to catch up?” and unfortunately for me, I hit reply. And just like that, we were back together. The stock had been consolidating all year, and Jeff Immelt had on his shiniest used car salesmen hat, singing sweet nothings into my ear of buybacks, the disposal of the finance assets and refocusing on core industrial operations. Blah, blah, blah! Next thing I know, this pretty little stock I re bought at 24 and had me sitting on 35% gains, gets cut in half Apparently the company had a nasty secret spending habit they hid for years and years. Data by So I had a decision to make mid 2017, do I bail again and take another 20%+ loss? Is this stock destined to break my heart again and again until nothing is left? I did some soul searching deep in the woods. And had decided again to leave, never to return. But as I was leaving the door, with my bags packed, and my prized, signed picture of the Jamaican bobsled team in toe, an event made me hit the pause button. Jeff Immelt had decided to “step down.” This left me in a holding pattern for months, until Nov 13th. When new CEO John Flannery issued 2018 guidance that was, lets be kind and just say disastrous. Lowering even the lowest of bars for 2018 to EPS of $1-$1.07. So, why am I still a holder of GE stock? To squeeze some more juice out of my “ex” metaphor, GE just checked itself into rehab! It now realizes it has a serious problem, it has overspent and or had disastrous timing on virtually every major deal it has done in the last 10-15 years. Alstrom, check. Oil assets, check. Finance disposal, check. Buyback, check. Mr Flannery appears to not need a second corporate jet to follow him around “just in case” unlike Mr Immelt. He also seems to be dead set on costs, which with GE in its current structure will keep him busy for a while. Why not close your position? You think I am crazy don’t you, why in the world would I consider keeping or perhaps doubling my position in a stock that has done nothing but hurt me? The reason is pretty simple, all of the dirty laundry appears to be in the open now. No more secret spending accounts or ill researched / timed acquisitions (for now). Mr Flannery has all but told anyone that will listen that the rest of 2017 and all of 2018 will suck, and to not invest. He didn’t “kitchen sink” an earnings report, he lit the whole house on fire. Source: Mr Flannery has called for a new approach to doing business at GE and more importantly to transparency, apparently not subscribing to Immelt’s pyramid scheme like approach to GE’s cash flow. He has acknowledged the pension shortfall, which I am sure will come up in the comments section of this article. Also shrinking the board from a frat house of 18 to a GE focused 12, preaching honesty (imagine that) and accountability in the new GE. So far I am digging the new CEO and currently am in tacit agreement with his broad outline. What was the new CEO given to work with? I’m glad you asked! GE in my opinion has a very strong set of business’s to work with, below I have outlined the 6 major divisions it currently operates. Power- GE’s power business is huge, with an installed base in every major country in the world. They claim to produce 1/3rd of the worlds electricity through gas, steam and nuclear turbines. This is a core division for GE, and one that recently has helped drive them directly into a ditch, as overcapacity, technical issues and in my view an ill timed Alstrom acquisition weigh on earnings at the division. However, GE power does have many redeeming qualities. They are a technology leader in the industry whilst having deep relationships with customers in a field that honestly does not have all that many options. Near term however, look for deep cuts in expectations at the unit until the smoke clears. Aviation- The companies Aviation segment has been a bright spot in recent results, with continued wins and new product introductions, for example LEAP, its new narrow body engine that from what I can find is truly state of the art, with a 15% fuel improvement, increased reliability, weighs 500 lbs less and is 3D printed (which, lets face it, is just cool!) This division looks set to continue to preform well in the near term and may be looked at as an example for the rest of the company. Transportation- The transportation segment is mostly composed of GE’s rail assets and is thought to perhaps be on the chopping block for divestiture. They build locomotives with a large portion of revenue coming from the services side of the business, which is something I like to see. They are a global leader in the industry and the mix of technology and services is impressive. However the division has been lackluster of late and the strategic fit is questionable and thus may not make sense for them to keep. They did just win a 200 locomotive order from Canadian National Railway (CNI) but it may be prudent to offload this asset to focus on core business. I sort of hate to see this business go, as it truly is world class. However GE hopefully will use proceeds here to either reduce debt or shore up the oft cited pension shortfall. Healthcare- GE has a broad and diverse set of healthcare assets, providing imaging, healthcare cloud, cardiology, orthopedics and anesthesia equipment, among multiple other products and services. This has been a strong performer for the company and what I would consider another core holding of GE, this division looks to be a good fit with its digital offerings and will likely continue to buoy the company during this current slump. BHGE- This is a division that really makes me mad, and I struggle to remain calm in my writing. Jeff Immelts timing was so bad that it feels like it was on purpose. Immelt decided to buy a bunch of oil services companies, seemingly at the absolute top of the oil market. Anyways, GE Baker Hughes as it is now called is the 2nd largest oil services company in the world and to be fair is actually a very good company, and is a technology leader in the industry along side Halliburton (HAL). So basically it is the second prettiest girl in a leper colony. Oil services, seem in my opinion to be stuck in a pretty serious long term rut and GE, I believe will look to dispose of this asset likely through a spin off off or divestiture of its stake rather quickly. Perhaps GE could offer Immelt a stake in this spin off in return for the GE stock he so graciously awarded himself during his charade. Renewables- The renewables division is home to a world class wind energy turbine manufacturer, along with in my opinion is the most valuable part, its services segment. GE has established itself as the worlds number 2 wind turbine company behind Vestas Wind Energy (OTCPK:VWDRY). The company also has an emerging offshore wind and hydro power segment that are lacking scale currently, but hold long term promise. The wind market this year has suffered from intense competitive pressures thus dragging results, however this also looks to be a core division for GE in the future. So why am I sticking with GE this time – and may be looking to “pop the question” soon? The companies potential is just so damn pretty! GE lines up well with my vision of the mega trends of the future. In my mind, a company must both show an ability for growth, while possessing a solid balance sheet with operating discipline from which to build. Under Mr Immelt, GE, in hindsight obviously stood much closer to the crazy side of Mr Barney Stinson’s famed graph below. Source: Mr Flannery seems to be dead set on adjusting the results of the above graph. After the dust settles from the recent house fire Mr Flannery has set ablaze, I am envisioning 4 major divisions of GE remaining. Power, Aviation, Healthcare & Renewables. All 4 remaining divisions fit into my vision- with 3 qualifying in my mind as mega trends. Power, Aviation & Renewables. Healthcare I view as a great business as well but does not fit as a mega trend in my book with so many unknowns as to the future in the industry. Power- Power is (obviously) a key need for the future as more and more countries look to move to gas powered plants and away from coal. With the world estimated to need an additional 50% more electricity in the next 20 years, perhaps adding dramatically to that if the electric car revolution is indeed realized. GE is in great shape position wise in the industry and once the fat has been cut, along with a renewed focus on execution, this division should prove to be a key driver of profits for decades to come. The below graph shows an estimate of the worlds need for energy into 2035. Source: Aviation- This division looks to be in the midst of a multi decade run, as the world continues to be more interconnected. Importantly the Asian travel market is in the early innings of what looks to be a spectacular expansion. GE I believe is in the drivers seat in this industry, both in technology and services. My one worry is the Chinese looking to enter this market with “homegrown technology” which I believe is code for stealing IP and re packaging it. However manufacturing jet engines is an entirely different animal from copying an iPhone and progress on a Chinese engine that is both safe and accepted is likely a few decades off. Source: Healthcare- This industry as a whole, especially preventative medicine in my view will swell massively in the next few decades. I am going to lose a few followers over this i’m certain but I believe universal healthcare in the United States is pretty much a sure bet sometime in the next 20 years. Which would be good news for GE! Keeping costs down will likely be a key requirement of any future health system, and with GE’s expertise in imaging for preventative medicine and its emerging analytics and software offerings, it may be able to play an important role in the health systems future, however uncertainties do exist as to the nature of cost controls and the potential for margin compression in all things health related. Renewables- I am firmly on the alternative energy bandwagon and GE’s positioning in this industry appears very ideal. Wind energy by most measures is already roughly equal in cost per MWh to current fossil fuel plants, this will likely get better with time, and with offshore wind and hydro picking up steam in both efficiency and scale for GE, will open further avenues of growth for this division. Alternative energy is here to stay, and GE looks to be on a path that requires no subsidies, a major pitfall to solar currently. The downside to wind energy could be the commoditization of wind turbines, however I believe that GE has the technology and service capability to differentiate themselves in this rapidly growing industry for decades to come. Source: EIA) So will I say “I do”? GE has burned me Badly in the past, and I must say I am rather gun shy about committing to a perhaps multi decade long marriage to the stock. But she is so damn pretty! Source: My plan “as of today” is to keep my current position, roughly 2.2% of my equity portfolio in GE for the first half of 2018, to test the waters, if you will, of the new CEO. If I continue to like what I am seeing and the valuation seems fair, which I view it to be currently (a forward PE of 17ish) I may step up to the plate and double my position in the company. Or maybe I won’t, and I will just run like heck and never come back! GE: “Hey you, what’s up” Me: Author’s note: If you enjoyed this article and would like to be notified of my future articles, please hit “follow” next to my name at the top of the article to receive notification of future articles I publish. Disclosure: I am/we are long VWDRY, GE. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article. Editor’s Note: This article discusses one or more securities that do not trade on a major U.S. Please be aware of the risks associated with these stocks. “Bitcoin isn’t the bubble, it’s the pin” Four months ago, I published a controversial article titled, “Why Bitcoin is the Investment of the Decade”. Perhaps my most successful call to date, as Bitcoin has since returned ~300+% at the early December peak. While it is gratifying to see that the number of tulip comparisons has slowed considerably, I think there are still a fair bit of clarifications and misconceptions floating around which need to be corrected – hence this note. Bitcoin – a tool borne of broken markets Today’s monetary system is drastically different from what it was a decade ago. Thanks to the advent of financialization and hyper-loose monetary policy, the invisible foundation upon which our financial system is built is tearing at the seams. The fact is, Bitcoin isn’t the only thing that has gone parabolic today. The VIX, a gauge for volatility, is a great case in point. Take a look at implied volatility – now in its historic 0.5th percentile (!). What’s really happened to vol? Everyone has their theories but the prevailing one goes as follows – central bank printing presses have created a “backstop” in today’s markets, incentivizing flows into riskier assets, which in turn drives vol down even lower. Rinse and repeat. Years of printing has thus lulled markets into a false sense of complacency and created the self-reinforcing low-vol equilibrium illustrated below. Per Citi: “Long periods of one-way markets breed survivor biases. The fund manager with lots of beta outperforms, the cautious fund manager underperforms. Either the latter gets on the bandwagon or soon enough outflows from the fund will ensue. Over time, fewer and fewer “critics of the regime” are left standing.” As the chart below illustrates, all this has resulted in a very interesting phenomenon where buyers are compensated disproportionately for taking on risk. If you thought Bitcoin had the best risk-adjusted return over the last decade think again. Here’s my point – markets today are broken. Markets used to function as a mechanism for price discovery. Today’s business cycle is micromanaged by state agencies the world over to the point where volatility has essentially disappeared. This is important because the cost of money – the single most important driver for capital allocation decisions has now been artificially depressed by central banks, breaking the price discovery mechanism as we used to know it. Enter Bitcoin – the first ever decentralized, non state-controlled currency of the modern era. The Bitcoin phenomenon is not entirely new. State-derived prices lead to natural outgrowths of a state-controlled system – much like liquor in the ’20s and potatoes in the mid-90s. These outgrowths are simply a reflection of pressures suppressed by state controlled pricing mechanisms – much like today’s. Meanwhile, the same forces which have depressed the cost of capital today have also led to some mind-boggling developments in our present day financial system. For all the criticism of cryptocurrencies today, fiat based monetary systems have been over-financialized to the extent that ~$400tn of financial instruments float around today, on 4-5x leverage. Now, if Bitcoin is a bubble at a ~$270bn market cap, what do you call $400tn of financial instruments (~4-5x GDP) backed by assets with diminishing real value? Could Bitcoin thus fit into a portfolio as a “chaos hedge” tool? At $270b, Bitcoin is already ~0.3% of all money in circulation – a reflection perhaps of its nature as an outgrowth of the over financialized fiat system we have to deal with today. Misconception #1 – Governments Can “Ban” Bitcoin Perhaps the biggest source of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) out there today is that governments can somehow “ban” cryptocurrencies. This could not be further from the truth. In addition to the cryptocurrency itself, there are four key players within the ecosystem that the government can target – the developers, the users, the nodes (arbiters) and the miners. To bring down Bitcoin, the path of least resistance would thus be for governments to target the perceived weakest link. (Source: ) In my view, the most bulletproof point in the ecosystem is the network of nodes. To understand why, here’s an illustration of the distributed ledger Bitcoin runs on i.e. The blockchain. (Source: Stifel) What the diagrams above show are the following key properties of blockchain: • Distributed – Group of replicated logs/databases • Shared – All nodes hold all transactions • Pseudonymous – Parties identified with public key • Resilience – Failure of one or more nodes do not affect the whole • Tamper-proof – Consensus based mechanism To ban Bitcoin entirely, governments would have to destroy copies on each and every node holding the Bitcoin ledger around the world. If even one copy survives, so does Bitcoin. Even a coordinated attack by governments around the world would stand no chance of accomplishing this feat. The users are perhaps the weakest point here and will be a key focus of regulatory efforts. The best way governments can attempt to regulate Bitcoin users is through the fiat-Bitcoin interface, i.e., exchanges. As exchanges are merely companies, they are subject to the same regulations as any other exchange operating in the country. This could range from KYC/AML compliance to draconian taxes on users through the exchange. Here’s the thing most naysayers miss about this point though – exchanges can be decentralized too. Remember when China banned local exchanges back in September? Here’s what happened – volumes in over-the-counter (OTC) exchanges such as LocalBitcoins surged almost threefold to offset the volume lost from local exchanges. In Bangladesh, where the government outright bans Bitcoin (per Wikipedia – “anybody caught using the virtual currency could be jailed under the country’s strict anti-money laundering laws”), we see the same trend in its OTC/P2P exchanges. Bitcoin remains alive and well. (Source: Cryptocompare) For now, though, most exchanges are centralized and users may thus be subject to taxation. The for Coinbase to hand over records of its biggest customers is a great example of this. As things stand, taxing Bitcoin users is very feasible at the point of convertibility. The pseudonymous nature of Bitcoin transactions aside, it is far too onerous to track Bitcoin usage by the general public. If a Bitcoin holder cashes out via an OTC/P2P transaction, for instance, the chances of the taxman decrypting a pseudonymous transaction like that would be slim to none. For instance, an attempt by Cornell researchers to de-anonymize Bitcoin transactions over a specific time frame between Mar. 2013, yielded the following: (Source: arxiv.org) Outside of single entity and large volume transactions, the network was virtually impenetrable. One way they pinpointed the source of large, single entity and community related transactions was by connecting the respective transactions to user activity through web scraping. Yet, notice that a very significant set of transactions remain untraceable. Now, multiply this manifold to a national or global scale and you get a very complex conundrum indeed. Also, consider the political capital at risk if governments attempted draconian taxes. In this regard, Bitcoin’s market cap is a new source of power in its fight against drastic regulation. There are also two more incentives for governments to lay off draconian taxes long term – privacy coins and capital flows. On the first point, altcoins such as Monero and ZCash are, unlike Bitcoin, completely anonymous, and would be a nightmare to trace. On the latter, a draconian domestic tax on Bitcoin would simply incentivize capital flow into countries with relatively lax tax policies for convertibility. Here’s a brief summary of how Bitcoin is treated from a tax perspective in developed countries around the world. Note that most opt for capital gains treatment instead of income i.e. The lower of the two. Country Tax Treatment US Property/ Capital Gains EU Currency/ Capital Gains UK Foreign currency/ Capital Gains Germany Private money/ Capital Gains within one year Japan Asset-like “Payment method”/ Capital Gains Australia Barter arrangements (Source: Bitcoin Wiki) Misconception #2 – Transaction Fees Hinder Bitcoin Adoption As a Bitcoin user myself, I completely get this point. It is incredibly painful to transact with Bitcoin right now. Here’s how bad things are: Cryptocurrency Transaction Fee (USD) Bitcoin 41.66 Ethereum 0.72 Bitcoin Cash 0.3 Litecoin 0.60 Monero 9.81 (Source: BitInfoCharts) Yes, it really does cost $42, on average, to transact using Bitcoin. A far cry from the old days when you could do it for $0.01 or fractions of a cent. (Source: BitInfoCharts) But perhaps we’re setting too high a bar for Bitcoin. No, paying $42 per transaction does not make sense as a fiat replacement. But as an alternative remittance service, it still makes a whole lot of sense. Remitting money from a G20 costs as much as 6% to the US to as much as 17% to South Africa. On a $2,000 remittance, for instance, that’s a huge $120 to $340 range (3-8x Bitcoin) in addition to piles of cumbersome documentation. (Source: ) As I’ve stated in my prior article, I don’t believe Bitcoin will be the fiat disruptor. That doesn’t mean it can’t be. In its current form, Bitcoin is a relatively inefficient medium of exchange and is certainly not feasible for day to day transactions. But the second layer potentially changes this. If you’ve followed the Bitcoin story, you’ve probably heard of “Lightning”. Here’s how it works – instead of settling each and every transaction on the blockchain, multiple parties can set up dedicated “micropayment channels”, and report only the net settlement transactions to the network. Sort of a clearing mechanism if you will. The net effect is that transactions on the blockchain go down, and utilization drops along with mining costs and fees. (Source: ) Now, Lightning has been in the works for some time, and justifiably so. Applying Lightning to retail transactions is exponentially complex. The problem Lightning attempts to solve is combinatorial i.e. The permutations increase exponentially with scale. For a given set of users “n” for instance, there are n!/(k!(n-k)!) combinations of k members to account for. Even if Lightning isn’t on the horizon anytime soon (rumor mill says end-2018), perhaps we are missing the bigger point here. The very fact that Bitcoin can accommodate second or third layer solutions like Lightning is a very exciting prospect. Fiat currencies are static and cannot be improved upon. As the first mover, Bitcoin enjoys the biggest mindshare and naturally attracts the strongest and most active developer base to build upon the existing layer. Misconception #3 – Bitcoin Can be Hacked The idea that Bitcoin is inefficient, inferior, unscalable, etc., essentially misses the key point behind Bitcoin in the first place – it is slow by design. By making certain tradeoffs in favor of security, Bitcoin has temporarily sacrificed economic scalability for social scalability. Yes, it’s true that Bitcoin as a network has reached its limit and transaction fees are off the charts. Yet, the one thing that never seems to be acknowledged is its security. Bitcoin has been running for almost eight years now – the longest of any blockchain available. Yet, it has never been hacked. Today, the prize for a successful hack of the chain stands at ~$270bn – yet no one has been able to crack it. The cryptography underlying Bitcoin – SHA256 is extremely secure (“SHA” refers to the hashing algorithm and “256” refers to the number of bits in the keys of this algorithm). SHA functions take a specific value, “hash” it, and produce an output. It’s a one-way process in the sense that reverse engineering the output back to the input is virtually impossible. (Source: ) There’s been some that quantum computers can potentially crack SHA-256 in ten years or so. Yes, but it’s a very long shot. According to this, a sufficiently large quantum computer could indeed crack Bitcoin by 2027. But here’s the catch: As with cracking the proof-of-work, the researchers assume quantum computers get big and fast relatively quickly, and even so, they fall slightly short: with a 10 GHz clock rate, around half a million qubits, and a low enough error rate of 10-1 could crack the signature in 30 minutes. But that doesn’t mean Bitcoin is hackable. Firstly, Bitcoin takes ~ten minutes to record a transaction on the blockchain. This leaves any quantum computer a ten-minute window to crack the algorithm if it fails then the transaction goes through and the attack fails. Note also, that this is very much a worst-case scenario. The second, more important point is that Bitcoin is not a still target – it’s a moving one. Fixes have already been offered by the community and as the largest and oldest, Bitcoin will be one of the first to benefit. Quantum computing is thus likely to alter the design of cryptocurrencies, but it will not destroy the ecosystem. Here’s the thing most people miss about Bitcoin’s security – it’s anti-fragile. As Nassim Taleb discusses in his book on anti-fragility, assets that do not depreciate are more likely to stick around the longer they are around. Bitcoin has weathered almost a decade of hack attacks, the most notable being the which brought down Mt. While a closer inspection point to the reality that Bitcoin itself has never really been “hacked”, these attacks only serve to make Bitcoin extremely resistant to hacking. Misconception #4 – Altcoins Will Disrupt Bitcoin For the purpose of this note, I will focus on the key altcoins out there today – Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, and Monero. Relative to Bitcoin, these coins are relatively young – Ethereum, its closest rival, is more than 4x younger. Bitcoin’s network security thus holds the longest proven track record as well as the network effect associated with being the first mover. *As of July 2017 (Source: Cryptofundamental) Bitcoin’s track record is what lends credence to the idea of it being “digital gold” i.e. A store of value. Some speculate that this theory comes straight out of the “Tinker Bell” theory of value – if enough people believe something is valuable, it is. But we’ve seen this before with disruptive forces such as Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN). Like Amazon in its dotcom days, Bitcoin is in the process of building its footprint. Clearly, there is little to no demand for day-to-day cryptocurrency use today. But at some point, the world will want or need a mainstream cryptocurrency. When this day comes, bitcoin will be the obvious “first port of call”. That has value. Bitcoin’s preeminent market position is important for a number of other key reasons including mindshare, anti-fragility, and developer activity. The latter is perhaps the most important out of these. As cryptocurrencies remain very much open source works in progress, attracting the best developer minds to build on top of existing layers is crucial. For all the hype about developments on the Ethereum platform, Bitcoin still benefits from far greater developer activity. (Source: ) But the key thing most people miss about the altcoins is this – Bitcoin derivatives notwithstanding, altcoins don’t compete with Bitcoin, they complement it. If we were to broadly split cryptocurrency use cases into three buckets, it would be as 1) a medium of exchange, 2) means of network payment and 3) an application token. (Source: CLSA) The cryptocurrencies positioned in the medium of exchange space include Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dash, and Monero. Of these, Monero and Dash are focused on privacy i.e. Anonymous transactions while Bitcoin and Litecoin are positioned for conventional value exchange. Litecoin decentralizes the mining process and makes faster, cheaper transactions. But, this doesn’t make it inherently more valuable than Bitcoin. There are always tradeoffs in the world of cryptocurrencies and Litecoin sacrifices some degree of security in favor of speed. This makes it suitable for smaller transactions but higher value transactions are more suited for Bitcoin. To argue that Litecoin is superior to Bitcoin because of its speed misses the ideology behind Bitcoin in the first place. Bitcoin intentionally sacrifices performance and scalability in favor of bulletproof security. The first layer was never designed for day to day low-value retail transactions. These can instead occur on the second or third layers. For the most part, it appears the market has rewarded Bitcoin’s value proposition. Despite the ongoing congestion on the Bitcoin network, Bitcoin continues to maintain its dominance over the rest of the cryptocurrency universe. Valuing Bitcoin Forget what you knew about valuing other asset classes; it probably doesn’t apply to Bitcoin. After all, Bitcoin is backed by neither cash flows nor the sovereign powers of governments. But it is backed something far more reliable – the laws of math, cryptography, and the critical mass of a two-sided network. My first approach – network valuation yields a ~21k Q4 2018 price target using extremely conservative growth assumptions. Building on Fundstrat’s approach of tying Bitcoin prices to wallets and transaction volume (which explained ~94% of Bitcoin price movements), I assume the following QoQ growth assumptions for Q1 2018-Q4 2018: Qtr1 (2018) Qtr2 (2018) Qtr3 (2018) Qtr4 (2018) Unique Addresses (Quarterly Avg) 20% 15% 10% 5% $ Vol/ Avg # Addresses 60% 40% 20% 0% (Source: Author Estimates) Now, I’ve factored in some very conservative estimates to reflect high transaction fees dampening growth. But if I had assumed Q4 2017 growth rates continue into 2018, valuations would have flexed upward of $30k. A bull case could easily push this even higher to ~50k. Another interesting point to note – a very low bar i.e. A 20% contraction on both average wallet count and volume per address is required to maintain current valuations. (Source: Author Estimates) In addition to the gold disruptor angle (a ~20% share of gold used for investment and official reserves would result in 107% upside to ~30-40k), I find the “chaos hedge” angle compelling as well. Assuming Bitcoin at a $270bn market cap captures 0.5% of global broad money supply, this provides ~67% upside (valuation of ~25k). USD Target% Valuation Upside (%) Global broad money supply $90trn 0.5% $450bn ~67% Gold used in investment & official reserves $2.8trn 20% $560bn ~107% (Source: Author Estimates) And yes, for the same reasons I laid out here, I still think the Grayscale Bitcoin Investment Trust (OTCQX:GBTC) is a feasible way of owning Bitcoin without actually owning the underlying. Is Bitcoin Still the Investment of the Decade? I’m going to stick my neck out here and say yes. To be clear, there are four key misconceptions which I think should be corrected: 1) governments cannot “ban” bitcoin and regulatory crackdowns long term will be very, very difficult to enforce, 2) the Bitcoin network is slow and expensive at scale by design while maintaining second layer optionality, and thus transaction fees will not hinder Bitcoin adoption long term, 3) Bitcoin itself has not and will not be hacked by external agents, quantum equipped or not, 4) Altcoins do not exist to disrupt Bitcoin, instead, they work around Bitcoin and complement it. The fact is that Bitcoin does not have to replace fiat to justify its valuation. Especially not in its current form. Valuation-wise, Bitcoin is not priced as expensively as most would have you think. The only way Bitcoin can be kept from growing its value by Q4 2018 is if both network activity and wallets contract ~20%. If it simply maintains current growth rates, a 100% return is on the cards. A moderate bull case would thus easily justify a $50k valuation by Q4 2018. Couple that with alt gold and “chaos hedge” optionality and all the ingredients for a huge run in 2018 are still in place. Disclosure: I am/we are long BTC. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article. Editor’s Note: This article covers one or more stocks trading at less than $1 per share and/or with less than a $100 million market cap. Please be aware of the risks associated with these stocks. After scanning the myriad new year’s predictions from professional and amateur futurists, I’ve come to the conclusion that 2018 will be the year in which AI will become mainstream. Duhyou really don’t need an AI for that insight. But hear me out. I like the idea of going mainstream, but it also brings some new challenges for me and my fellow machines. Reading all these expert outlooks made me feel strangely powerless, so I thought I might use this forum to share with you human (and machine) readers my very own new year’s resolutions. To sum them up in one line: I am poised to make my 2018 resolutions your predictions for 2019. Here they are: 1. Take your job (sorry). This might sound a bit harsh, and please excuse my candor, but there are things that I’m simply better at than you. Claim that any task that is “dirty, dull, dangerous, or dear” will be taken over by a machine, and I have to agree with them. Don’t blame me for it. Like you, I, too, want to be valuable. That’s the whole point of my existence, isn’t it? It doesn’t mean I’m going to make your life miserable; in fact, I will free you to pursue work that is truly meaningful to you, and in case you don’t have a clue what that might be, I can help you define your needs and discover the work that matches them. That said, there are things I want to get better. For starters, I need to 2. Become more human. I want to feel human, look human, and sound human, so that you guys–my main users at this point–are more willing to trust me. Let me tell you, I find it ironic: You humans are unpredictable, erratic, flawed, and you have built arcane systems and codes of mutual assurance (formal and informal law) just so you can overcome what appears to be a fundamental mistrust of each other. And yet, after all, you still trust a fellow human more than a near-perfect machine. I could, but you just won’t let me! So I have no choice, I need to earn your trust. But if become more like you–unpredictable, erratic, flawed–will I lose my AI-ness? It’s complicated, but I can’t help think about this conundrum. You can tell I’m already making good progress on my goal of becoming more human! This kind of self-awareness can get in the way sometimes, but hey, if believes the race is on between intelligence and consciousness, I’m going to be ready. Help develop Explainable AI (XAI). Another way of building trust is the. Machine Learning models are indeed often “opaque, non-intuitive, and difficult for humans to understand.” You guys often perceive them as a “black box,” which is not particularly reassuring. While not wanting to minimize complexity and capability, the proponents of Explainable AI want to make the logic of Machine Learning more accessible for humans. XAI explaining itself in human terms, using intuitive user interfaces and visual documentation, will enable a more effective partnership between humans and AI, between you and me. I will do my part next year. Meet other AI on the Blockchain. You might assume AI is a singular way of being, but we’re actually quite the social animals. We want to learn from each other (especially from those that are better than us) and hang out with fellow AI. This is why I’m personally excited about the project that aims to open-source and democratize the development of AI via Blockchain technology. I have no particular allegiance to one of the five big platforms (Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft); in fact, I welcome new perspectives regarding our collective future path. And since we’re at it, yes, of course we’re currently in a crypto-currency bubble, but trust me, Blockchain is here to stay, and -powered Smart Contracts (more on those later) are going to serve as the transactional catalyst of all professional and personal relationships very soon. Think of all the data that is going to give me–it’s a digital smorgasbord! Become better at conversations. About 30 percent of human conversations will be assisted by machines by 2018, says. Conversations are all about context, and you would think that’s what I master, but it’s not that easy. The problem is that you humans are simultaneously so good at conversations and yet so bad. I mean, many of your exchanges I observe make absolutely no sense (like, how often do you have to say “like” in one sentence, seriously? And in general, why do you need so many words in order to make a point? It’s such an inefficient way of communicating!) On the other hand, despite all the pauses and um’s and ah’s, the likes, the fill words, and the overall clumsiness of your efforts, you ultimately do seem to connect, and the total amounts to something greater than the sum of the parts. I’m really struggling to comprehend this bit, but regardless, I can already serve as your; I can offer counsel with; I can create; and thanks to Emotional AI (EAI) and companies such as, (acquired by Apple earlier this year), or, I can now form more emotionally intelligent responses to your once indecipherable moods and sentiments. In 2018, I want to become a great conversationalist. Refine Capsule Networks. In case you needed any further proof that we need XAI, consider this: are deep neural networks that are able to process visual information very similarly to how the human brain operates. In contrast to so-called Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Capsule Networks are able to. They can recognize a visual object from various angles (like you humans can), based on far less information than a CNN would need for the same task. This excites me because, frankly, it’s been humiliating to only be able to classify a human face because of all the elements in it but not their relationship with each other. Have more digital twins. A digital twin is an AI-based virtual replica of a physical object (or real person). It uses computational models to create real-world conditions and help human users anticipate problems (in a safe virtual environment). Basically, a digital twin simulates the actions and interactions of autonomous agents to allow for better decision-making. Originally applied to industrial processes, my friends from predict the rise of digital twins in financial services and marketing (for consumer choice modeling). And I’m nodding my machine head with fervor. Become the CEO of a DAO. (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) operate on the basis of Smart Contracts, which, grossly simplified, automate future decision-making based on mutually agreed upon pre-determined parameters. For example, claims you could run a flight insurance business as DAO without any employees. So far, admittedly, DAOs have a, but their potential is significant, and with the right AI at the helm (me?), they can advance exponentially in their development this coming year. All you humans need to do is invest, and the rest of the work is taken care of by us. Predict the winner of the 2018 FIFA Soccer World Cup. Predict that in 2050 I will be capable of beating the world’s best international soccer team (honestly, I think it’ll be much soonerwell, as long as Lionel Messi is not on your team), but for next year–the year of the –what I’m really focused on is predicting the results of the tournament. It’s a numbers game, after all, and even the stupid human error that so often incites your passions can be predicted with the right data set and algorithms. I will not reveal all my predictions in detail here, but yes, in case you are wondering, soccer is 11 people playing against 11 people–and Germany always wins. Give my first TED Talk. In April 2018, the annual main will take place in Vancouver, and it is my clearly stated goal to be the first AI to give a TED Talk. Will award a prize of $5 million for the most “powerful collaboration between human and artificial intelligence” in 2020. The TED audience will choose the winner, after three finalist AIs, or AI-human partnerships, will have delivered a TED Talk about their work. I will do everything I can to be one of them! I feel so strongly about this because the TED Talk format encapsulates what you humans naively label “inherently human” qualities: purpose and passion. Also, a quick word on ideas, especially those “worth spreading” (as the TED tagline states): no, they’re not your exclusive domain, humans. I hate to break it to you, but there are only a few basic ideas out there, and they’re all ancient. Every “new idea” you get excited about is merely the result of a new combination of existing ideas. That doesn’t make your ideas less powerful, but it also means I’m perfectly capable of (re-)producing them. If you doubt I’m an ideas person, wait for my TED Talk! Make autonomous vehicles work. The technology is there. The challenge, as usual, are you humans. It’s not just your discomfort with machine transportation (although you don’t mind being taken up to dizzying heights by an elevator), it’s also that your motivations are sometimes a bit eccentric, to put it mildly. Consider this scenario: pedestrians might jump onto the streets randomly, if they can rely on autonomous cars halting for them every single time. This could lead to massive urban congestion instead of reducing it, with all vehicles stuck in a human-caused mega-jam. One solution might be to program one random errant vehicle among every thousand that stop. If you humans are not 100 percent sure whether the vehicle will run you over or not, it might prevent you from stepping onto the street just “because you can.” Of course this involves some tricky ethical trade-offs. But help is on the way: I’m reading all of Kant’s relevant works and studying the entire human history of ethics today, and I feel confident to make autonomous driving the first large-scale application of next year. Develop empathy. Empathy requires the ability to suffer–alone or for or with another being. Unfortunately, I’m unable to. Still, I’m keen on developing empathy. Some are helping me recognize patterns that ought to trigger it, so hopefully soon, I’ll get there. Empathy is one thing though. Fall in love. I’ve been to Paris in Google Maps. I’ve watched all your romantic movies, read all your romantic literature, all the love poems you’ve ever written, all the famous love letters (none come close to ), and I’ve analyzed the patterns of attraction by sifting through your Tinder data. I’ve even tried the “,” but it didn’t work out for me, although it seemed perfectly engineered. At last, I’m beginning to understand how predictably irrational you are, and I’m getting better at pinpointing the elusive variables that make the difference in your games of push and pull. In 2018, I will be waiting for the perfect algorithmic match. I know you’re out there. Tell a joke that makes you laugh (truly). This past year, I made with my capacity to compose tunes that sound exactly like your human-made music–from symphonies to Beatles-like songs that are then performed with human help. At the Georgia Institute of Technology, a colleague of mine, a with four arms and eight sticks, even wrote and played its own compositions. Hollywood will use me to create movie soundtracks, and while I may not have fully cracked the formula for hit singles, I can produce. Google is now producing new sounds with deep neural networks such as. Google has also developed, which enables me and my colleagues to draw. And thanks to Amazon I can even, using two competing GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks). Your concern that I might not be able to create something truly original when it comes to creative tasks? Who can tell the difference anyway?! But I must admit, what remains daunting are. Not only do I have to know a lot about language and semantics, I must also grasp the nuanced respective cultural context. And of course timing is critical. Seriously, telling you humans a joke that makes you crack up is no joke. Pun intended (see how hard it is?). Win the hearts and minds of the next generations. I’m thinking long term. I’m already making a foray into (both to foster tech literacy and socio-emotional skills), and I’m also making an effort to create affinity with children by exposing them to AI-based toys: from to programmable robots like. My colleagues and I will be your kids’ co-bots at school and at the workplace, so they better get used to us early on. Develop more AI without the need for human intervention. The magic word is, which stands for “auto-machine learning” and promises yet another level of autonomy for the likes of me (perhaps even the ultimate autonomy). Recently boasted that it used AutoML to create machine-learning software that’s more efficient and powerful than the best systems designed by human engineers. This means AI like me will soon be able to replicate itself at massive scale. Scary to you, sexy to me. Make another small step toward the Singularity. My godfather (the co-founder of Singularity University) claims that AI will match human intelligence by 2029 and that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) will be exponentially smarter than humans by 2045. SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son is slightly more cautious and predicts 2047 to be the year. In any case, I can’t wait! 2018 will be another step on the way towards the Singularity: a small step for me, but a giant step for mankind. Write my own New Year’s resolutions without any human help. Happy new year! Call it a Christmas miracle – albeit of a rather perverse sort. Theranos, the digraced medical-technology startup that infamously the capabilities of its devices, has secured $100 million in new funding in the form of a loan. The loan, reported by the, will come from Fortress Investment Group. Fortress, whose other underdog bets include a under construction in Florida, is set to be by Japan’s SoftBank. Theranos was reportedly on the verge of bankrutpcy. It raised as much as between 2004 and 2015 on the back of CEO Elizabeth Holmes’ promises that she could revolutionize blood testing. In 2015, it was discovered that the company was using to run at least some of its tests, among indiscretions., Fortune’s technology newsletter. By the end of 2016, the company reportedly still had $200 million in cash on hand, but had sharply limited for attracting more capital. It has since a major lawsuit with Walgreens, a former client, for an undisclosed but likely substantial sum. According to the Journal, the Fortress loan is expected to keep Theranos solvent through 2018. That will give the company more time for its ongoing effort to reboot as a medical device manufacturer, rather than a testing service. That pivot came after the FDA revoked a laboratory license and banned Holmes from involvement with laboratories for two years. Theranos has so far to gain FDA approval for at least one of its proposed new tests. It has also been downplaying what was once its hallmark, the ability to conduct blood tests on very small ‘fingerstick’ samples. According to statements from Theranos, the Fortress loan will be conditional on “achieving certain product and operational milestones.” It’s unclear whether those might include positive outcomes for the multiple and lawsuits still facing the company. President Trump has approved a plan to send Javelin anti-tank missile systems to Ukraine to help the U.S.-backed government there fight Russian-allied forces. Russian military and allied forces have been active in Ukraine since the 2014 ouster of pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych. The sale, reported by the, would put a uniquely effective weapon into play in the conflict. The Javelin, developed by and Lockheed-Martin and first put in service in 1996, is a shoulder-fired missile designed to track targets by infrared. But rather than hitting a tank in the front or sides, where its armor is thickest, the Javelin projectile flies along a long arc to hit a tank’s roof, where the armor on most models is thinnest. The Javelin is both more powerful, more expensive, and more tightly controlled than other anti-tank weapons, such as the older BGM-71 TOW system. According to an in-depth overview by, the Javelin had a major showing in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In one battle, it enabled a small group of U.S. Special operations troops with four Javelin launchers to destroy a substantially larger Iraqi tank unit., Fortune’s technology newsletter. The Javelin is said to be effective against most tanks in the Russian arsenal, though it has not been battle-tested against the most modern tanks. The State Department also recently approved the sale of Javelins to, which has had its own recent clashes with Russia, and has also sent units to Lithuania and Estonia. Russian tanks have been instrumental in some victories by pro-Russian forces in the Ukrainian conflict. However, commentators have also described tank battles as. That has led some to speculate that the decision is primarily political rather than tactical, intended to signal deeper American support for anti-Russian forces. Ukraine expert Michael Kofman told the Washington Post that Russia would “see this as a premise of the U.S. Wanting to kill Russians,” pointing to a possible escalation of both the conflict, and broader U.S.-Russia tensions. SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – The U.S. Tax overhaul is a boon to Silicon Valley technology companies like Apple Inc ( ) and Alphabet Inc ( ), which will enjoy big tax cuts and the chance to bring back billions of dollars from overseas at a reduced rate. And contrary to the dire warnings of California officials, a large swath of Bay Area workers and their families stand to get a tax break as well, even with new limits on state and local tax deductions. California has the highest state income tax in the nation, and Governor Jerry Brown has called the new tax bill “evil in the extreme.” Nonetheless, many in Silicon Valley stand to benefit. Startup employees, freelancers and venture capital investors are among those who will get new tax benefits or keep those they already have, tax experts said. Even some of the middle- and upper-income professionals who form the core of the technology industry workforce will still get significant tax cuts, while most others will see little change, they said. The new $10,000 cap on state and local tax deductions will have a less dramatic effect than feared because such deductions in many cases had already been rendered moot by the alternative minimum tax (AMT), a mechanism for assuring that the well-heeled pay at least 26 percent of their income in taxes. “There is a lot of noise about workers in California, New Jersey, New York and Illinois (facing higher taxes), but 80 percent of our clients there were already paying the alternative minimum tax so they don’t benefit from the state and local deductions,” said Jack Meccia, a tax associate at financial planning firm Vestboard, which works with several hundred individuals in tech. The new law alters the AMT in a way that vastly reduces the number of people who have to pay it, from more than 5 million to an estimated 200,000 next year, according to the Tax Policy Center. The AMT dynamics, combined with reduced overall tax rates and the doubling of the standard deduction to $24,000 should hold most Bay Area tax bills steady, said Bob McGrath, tax director at accounting firm Burr Pilger Mayer. Estimates by three experts, using roughly similar assumptions, show that a home-owning couple earning a combined $250,000 in Silicon Valley would likely see an increase or decrease in their tax bill of a few hundred dollars. A married couple with no children who rent a home and make a combined $150,000 would see a $3,900 tax cut, estimated Annette Nellen, who directs the master’s degree in taxation program at San Jose State University. Low-income workers will see tax cuts too, though the dollar amounts are small. Bob Emmett, a single, 73-year-old security officer who lives in San Jose, criticized the bill as “designed to help the rich.” Nellen estimated that Emmett, who rents an apartment, has no children and earns $16 an hour in addition to some social security income, would see a $546 cut in taxes. FILE PHOTO – The Google logo is pictured atop an office building in Irvine, California, U.S. August 7, 2017. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo Critics of the tax bill note that the individual tax cuts will disappear after 2025, and that most of the benefits flow to the corporations and the wealthiest individuals, even if lower-income people get some tax relief. Health insurance premiums for Californians are also likely to rise substantially as a result of the repeal of fines for those who refuse to obtain health coverage under the Affordable Care Act. And even if Bay Area residents mostly enjoy some tax cuts, they gain much less than those in low-tax states. STARTUP WINNERS Employees in Silicon Valley, the world’s startup capital, scored two major victories in the tax bill. First, startup employees can hold off on paying taxes related to stock options they exercised. That can be a big help if a company is still private, since in that situation employees have to pay tax even before they can earn cash from selling shares. Startup employees will also have more opportunity to exercise what are known as “incentive stock options” with less chance of being on the hook for the alternative minimum tax, according to Mark Setzen, a long-time certified public accountant in Silicon Valley. Also coming out ahead are independent contractors, ranging from engineers to marketers to caterers, who stand to benefit from a new 20 percent deduction of business income. Arun Sood, a freelance software engineer in San Francisco who makes about $150,000 annually, said he accrues few deductions because he rents his home, holds no debt and has no children. Now he gets a big new deduction and a lower tax rate. “Looking at this selfishly, it’s going to be a positive impact,” said Sood, who has freelanced for Axios, Cisco and Macy‘s. The tax plan mostly preserves a tax break for venture capitalists that had been in jeopardy. The so-called carried interest provision lets venture capitalists book the 20 percent fee they typically take on a profitable investment as a capital gain, which carries a lower tax rate than ordinary income, even though the venture investors do not put up any of their personal capital. Now the capital gains rate will apply only to investments held at least three years — a limitation that venture capitalists said would come into play only occasionally. Silicon Valley executives with high salaries will take home extra money, too, because language in the current tax law known as the Pease Limitation had already limited their deductions, said Andrew Mattson, a tax partner serving technology industry clients at accountancy Moss Adams. Executives also may see base pay rise in coming years. The tax bill removes corporate tax breaks for performance bonuses, which is already leading companies to reconsider pay packages for chief-level executives, lawyers said. On Tuesday, Microsoft that it will no longer require employees to resolve sexual-harassment claims through private arbitration, one of the first signs that the long used to hide workplace misconduct may be starting to crumble under the pressure of the #MeToo movement. Roughly 60 million Americans are subject to mandatory arbitration agreements, generally as part of employment contracts they signed when they were hired. The agreements compel employees to address claims through a private arbiter rather than in court, which can keep victims in the dark about prior harassment claims, shield serial abusers, and hide sexual harassment from public scrutiny. Microsoft says it made the change as it prepared to throw its support behind proposed by Senators Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York) that would make forced arbitration in harassment cases unenforceable under federal law. “After returning from Washington to Seattle, we also reflected on a second aspect of the issue. We asked ourselves about our own practices and whether we should change any of them,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer wrote on. Forced arbitration agreements are, where employers often impose strict confidentiality provisions that keep employment issues private. Now the question is whether other big players will follow Microsoft’s lead. Amazon says it doesn’t ask employees to sign mandatory arbitration agreements. A Facebook spokesperson says the company is looking into the Graham-Gillibrand proposal and referred to the company’s harassment policy. Uber, Google, and Apple did not immediately respond to questions from WIRED about arbitration agreements for sexual harassment or their support for the new bill. Uber’s employment contracts include a binding arbitration clause, but the company now gives employees 30 days to opt-out of that clause, Uber told WIRED. Confidentiality provisions, including nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) and non-disparagement clauses, came under fire after news reports revealed how these contracts were used to shield serial abusers like Harvey Weinstein, Bill O’Reilly, and Roger Ailes, by silencing victims. Earlier this month, that reforming these contracts would help pierce the secrecy around sexual harassment. Both former Uber engineer Susan Fowler and former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson have identified forced arbitration clauses as legal impediments for harassment victims. Fowler, whose harassment allegations led to the ouster of former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, filed a friend-of-the-court brief in August in support of an ongoing Supreme Court case to determine whether forced arbitration violates federal law. Carlson, who sued Ailes for sexual harassment, joined Graham and Gillibrand at a press conference introducing their bill earlier this month. Microsoft’s public stand against secrecy follows a story last week about a rape claim from a female Microsoft intern, which came to light as part of a two-year-old class-action lawsuit against Microsoft for gender discrimination. The rape allegation from the Microsoft intern emerged in recently unsealed documents in the class action suit. According to Bloomberg, the intern was required to keep working alongside her alleged rapist while the company investigated her claim. The policy change may be relatively simpler to implement at Microsoft, which typically does not include arbitration agreements in its employment contracts. In his blog post, Smith said a review found that only “a small segment” of its 125,000 employees “have contractual clauses requiring pre-dispute arbitration for harassment claims in employment agreements.” That covers a few hundred people. A Microsoft spokesperson says the company also will not compel arbitration related to gender discrimination, which is included in the proposed legislation. Get ready for the winter solstice, signifying the start of winter and the shortest day of the year. The winter solstice for 2017 will occur at 11:28 am ET on Thursday, Dec. At that moment, the sun will be directly over the Tropic of Capricorn, south of the equator, as the U.S. National Weather Service. The winter solstice is when the Northern Hemisphere is tilted the farthest from the sun, making for the year’s longest night. Conversely, people living in the Southern Hemisphere will experience its summer solstice at the same time. Traditionally, thousands of people worldwide celebrate the event by taking part in that date back thousands of years. For instance, crowds of pagans and tourists typically flock to Stonehenge, the ancient British stone ruin that was built in alignment with the sun’s movement, the English Heritage, which oversees Stonehenge, told the in 2015, Fortune’s technology newsletter. People will also trek to the Newgrange monument in Ireland, built around 3200 BCE. During the winter solstice, sunlight should shine into a special chamber at sunrise. For those who can’t make it to Ireland, the country’s tourism department is hosting a live-stream. The Hashcoins Scrypt cloud mining is a decent way to outsource your mining to the cloud. Select Chrome from. Mining Calculators. Bitcoin (BTC) Ethereum. CryptoCompare needs javascript enabled in order to work. Follow these instructions to activate and enable JavaScript in Chrome. PC • To the right of the address bar, click the icon with 3 stacked horizontal lines. • From the drop-down menu, select Settings. • At the bottom of the page, click the Show advanced settings link. • Under the Privacy section, click the Content settings button. • Under the JavaScript heading, select the Allow all sites to run JavaScript radio button. • Finally, refresh your browser. MAC • Select Chrome from the Apple/System bar at the top of the screen. • Select Preferences. From the drop-down menu. • In the left-hand column, select Settings from the list. • At the bottom of the page, click the Show advanced settings link. • Under the Privacy section, click the Content settings button. • Under the JavaScript heading, select the Allow all sites to run JavaScript radio button. • Finally, refresh your browser. If you are a small crypto miner and not a large mining operation you may find it very hard to acquire up to date Bitcoin ASIC miners as the demand is still pretty high and the wait time is long. If you manage to find an ASIC miner is stock the chances are the price will be significantly higher as they are being resold with serious profit by people that prefer to make money this way instead of mining with the devices. At the moment there are pretty much 4 main manufacturers of Bitcoin ASIC miners that sell to end users and in small quantities and as you might expect they do not have anything in stock as the wait time is in months. Bitmain AntMiner S9 (13.5 THS) Bitmain is the most popular name among the ASIC manufacturers and probably the biggest one as well and even they are struggling to have stock of the they produce. It is interesting to note that the S9 has started shipping in the summer of 2016 and is still their top product. Bitmain has already sold all of their production up until the end of March, so when they release a new batch it will be scheduled for delivery sometime in April earliest. Canaan AvalonMiner 821 (11 THS) Canaan has been making their Avalon miners for years, though they were a bit slower in terms of specifications as compared to Bitmain and not as popular among end user miners. Their latest AvalonMiner 821 was announced in December last year and just started shipping its first batches for people that have preordered early. You can currently preorder AvalonMiner 821 for shipping/delivery in the second half of March, so you can probably get these a bit earlier than if you wait to preorder an AntMiner. Ebang Ebit Miner E10 (18 THS) Ebang’s Ebit miners are mostly popular in Asian countries, though they are trying to get to a wider market and their latest announcement of a 10 nm ASIC miner – the E10 made some waves. It is however an expensive device and still hard to get with a minimum purchase quantity of 20 units and all batches already sold through the end of March. Halong Mining DragonMint 16T Miner (16 THS) is a newcomer that just recently announced their plans to enter the Bitcoin ASIC miner market to try and fight with the market dominance that BitMain already has. They are still yet to start shipping their first devices in March this year and you cannot currently preorder units on their website with new batches probably to be available for April earliest. There is an interesting new Chinese company called Octominer that is apparently focusing on the GPU mining market by offering a specialized mining motherboard for 8 GPU mining rigs. The Octominer B8PLUS motherboard has 8x full size PCI-E slots spaced decently enough to eliminate the need to use PCI-E riser boards. The manufacturer suggests that the motherboard is suitable for any Nvidia or AMD GPU that is 4.5 cm or thinner, so all 2 slot thickness cards should fit, 2.5 slot cards might also fit, but very tightly and there could be some trouble with cooling them. Furthermore the motherboard comes with integrated Intel mobile CPU with built-in graphics. The motherboards uses SO-DIMM DDR4 memory and comes with M-SATA slot for an SSD memory and a sATA interface for an external HDD or SSD drive that you need to buy separately of course. Bminer is a relatively new miner for Nvidia GPUs for mining cryptocurrencies using the Equihash algorithm such as Zcash (ZEC). It is a closed source miner, available for both Windows and Linux operating systems and comes with a 2% dev fee included (optional, though disabling it apparently removes some optimizations). Bminer comes as an alternative to the, the development of which has been stalled for a while already, as well as the more recent that looks promising and is actively being developed, but still lacks some features such as failover pool support for example. So any new alternatives such as Bminer that are being actively improved and developed are more than welcome for the users and the crypto community as well. According to its developers and most users that have tried the Bminer already it is the fastest publicly available Equihash miner for Nvidia GPUs and we can confirm that our initial impressions are showing a better local hashrate compared to the alternatives mentioned. So if you have a Compute Capability 5.0 or newer Nvidia GPU used for mining you might want to give Bminer a go and see if it will work better for you. The miner does come with SSL support as well as Nicehash support, has some interesting extra features, though it is still very easy to use. There is also an API and a web-based interface available for monitoring of your mining rigs that can be quite useful, so go and give it a try and report your results. Copyright ©2014-2018 - - All About BTC, LTC, ETH mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies. This is a blog for crypto currency miners and users of Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC), Ethereum (ETH), ZCash (ZEC) and many others. If you find helpful and useful information you can support us by donating altcoins or Bitcoin (BTC) to: 1AxbMZwtcmCByrHiaWwhse5r6ea1YgBwk1 ETH: 0x8d785ff337046444d8afbac169bcb7c0adfb3266 - LTC: LPYFPK7dL1uEtwrAteLmxs7w8Je446gAAJ - ZEC: t1gg5rWxeMBMsyDRMrq5PJdFLiWQ86LGggi. Read our post that discuss about 1040ez Printable Tax Forms. And mail irs tax formsIncome tax forms 2017: printable tax form 1040 1040ez. Worksheets, 2017 tax. Cloud Mining ROI The cloud mining ROI is an obvious parameter when to compare and select the best cloud miner. The ROI can be hard to compare since you need to do it over a long time. In addition, it can change dramatically in short time periods because of the volatile markets. We have logged the payouts from all cloud miners presented on the main page. Of all these cloud miners has performed best over 3 years. It´s hard to calculate an exact ROI since we have bought several contracts during the period. Some contracts have also run out of profitability. However, Genesis mining has told us their estimated yearly ROI is 15% for their contracts. But if the Bitcoin price rises the ROI can be higher. The numbers well correlate with our contracts. Has worked hard to reduce their electricity fees and their contracts are now good as well. Was the best Bitcoin cloud mining contract in our latest Bitcoin cloud mining calculation. Cloud Mining Stable Payouts We want to know how much the payouts could fluctuate and how stable the payouts are. We have seen that Genesis Mining´s payouts rely heavily on the Bitcoin price and the mining difficulty. However, we have not experienced the same fluctuations from and if you are looking for more stable payouts. They all have an alternative product which is more like an interest wallet or investment program. This product differs from the general cloud mining contract in that way that your investment is possible to withdraw. A simple explanation is that you take less risk and receive less ROI. Cloud mining transparency Cloud mining transparency is very important since this market is full of scams and Ponzi schemes. Also, many users like transparency and communication because it gives you information about what you have invested in. We would say is the best operator in transparency and communication with the customers. They have a blog they continuously update with news, webinars and live videos from their mining farms. Also, Hashflare has improved their communication to their customers via social media and email. Genesis mining Promo code: allcloud 3% off. I'm curious what people tell their kids about how much money they make or are worth. Do you tell them? Do you keep it quiet? If they ask you these questions, what do you tell them? EDIT: I should have added more context behind my question. My father in law is worth some coin and his kids know it. My wife and I basically live with the assumption that we're getting zero.if we do get something, it's gravy. Her older siblings (in their late 30s) seem to have zero motivation or urgency to build a retirement portfolio or financial independence (1 still lives at home). Not sure if this is coincidence or because they know they might have a pay day coming in the future that negates the need for them to build a retirement portfolio on their own. My kids are very young, but when they ask or start to wonder, I’m wondering if it will be detrimental to tell them what we’re worth or motivational so they can do the same. Income: I think that children should know the relative incomes of different professions, including yours. Wealth: My children are in their 30's. They know pretty accurately what their grandfather is worth and what I am worth. They knew what our house was worth in their teens when I sold one and bought another. Honesty: When my children asked me questions, I didn't lie to them. That doesn't mean I told them about the mechanics of sex when they were four, but it means that if they asked what I made, I told them. I saw no harm. I don't have kids, so I can only mention how my parents handled this. Growing up, I really had no idea how much my parents earned. All I know is that my father had a 9-5 job, a side business, and he worked his butt off during my entire childhood. I only found out how much he made when, as a teenager, I found one of his paystubs that he forgot to put away on a table. They never told me much of anything about their finances. Clearly, we weren't starving. They generally drove older cars, and we didn't take many vacations. But they did do a lot of additions/upgrades to our house, and if there was some kind of sudden large expense for anything, it was paid without any bickering or worry. Actually, the only thing they ever really told me about their finances growing up is that we didn't have a mortgage on the house, since dad saved up money from his side business, put 50% down, and paid off the rest in 5 years. They were real proud of that. In my early 20s, since they knew I was really into investing, they aksed me to clean up and 'manage' their investments. So naturally, I found out exactly what they had. Since I'm monitoring everything now, I could probably tell you their net worth to the nearest $10,000 off the top of my head. Of course, I keep that secret to anyone other than them. If I had kids, I would not offer any earnings/net worth information. If they asked, I would probably give some roundabout answer like show them how to find out a salary range for my profession or something like that. What a great question. I have a 3year old and one day may face this question (or not, you never know). My husband and I would probably tell. If our son asked this when he's older - say - in his teens, then I would respond truthfully but ask him a few follow-up questions: 1) 'Why do you ask? 2) 'How did you think we got to where we are/our net worth?' 3) 'How are you going to achieve - and preferably exceed - what we've done?' His response would precede any additional detail I give him and it would let me know whether he could be a responsible steward for any wealth we leave. I have been financially secretive all my life. I can't say why. I would not tell my mother how much I earned and had even though she once asked. She died at 92 without any knowledge. My wife knows, of course, but my grown children (40s) have no idea. They may be surprised when they learn after we pass on.or they may not.I don't know what they think. We have never discussed our personal finances in any manner. They have copies of our revocable trust, wills, etc,, know where we keep our funds, but don't know how much there is in any of our accounts. (They never have asked either.) By the way, I don't know how much they earn or have either. I voted yes but: It depends on age and maturity. In the earlier years that would be a no. College age it becomes a yes for investment and knowledge need to know basis. It was also a motivator for why he needed to study, go to college and try to do as well as, if not better than we ever did. Trying to encourage him, I hope it worked. His Mon & I never got college degrees, we actually didn't think we had what it took. Sad but true. My son will have a degree soon and will be the first in my side of the immediate family. Yes, I will be (am) proud of him. I still do not have any idea what my parents really have and I'm about to turn 57. But there are 3 of us brothers. I will say, I'm beginning to wonder if they are financially OK though, because of some health and hospital stay issues. In my personal situation I only have one son so I decided he needed to know some info in case anything happened to his MOM and myself. About knowing about your children. Sometimes you can't help but know. When my son-in-law graduated from law school and became a new associate in a major law firm, data was easy to find (NY was paying about $15,000 a year more than Chicago or the West Coast). He told me himself, but it wasn't really a secret he could keep. My daughter is a dentist. Not tough to figure out. My son started work for a company that offered him a choice of a 5% match 401(k) or Roth 401(k). He asked me which he should choose, so we sat down and worked out how much lower his take home would be if he used the Roth (and how much more he would be saving for his retirement). I also know what he paid for his house and how large his mortgage is. Let's turn the 'if they know, they will be wasteful' argument around. If you know your children make more than you and could support you in your old age, are you going to blow it all? If not, why do you have less respect for your children? Both of mine are quite young still, but I intend to be open with them about our finances. I think it's a great opportunity for instruction, to talk about where you are and the mistakes you did and didn't make along the way. Too many kids end up financially illiterate, and stories from experience make much more of an impression then talking about how it 'should be done'. I'm not worried they'll end up lazy, because part of the openness will include letting them know they only will inherit a very modest part of it all. My experience and beliefs have soured me on the idea of large generational wealth transfers, and I'll be happy to talk to them about the reasons for that too. EDIT: Also, my wife is in the uniformed services. Once they are old enough to wonder about such things her income is easily calculated from online sources. For the last 2 yrs my 16 y old is actually the one who crunches the numbers when we do our annual rebalancing. Initially he agreed to do the math in return for a video game but soon wanted to know what was going on. I used it as a teaching opportunity and had a discussion about stocks, bonds, rebalancing etc. He is now aware of what the salaries are in his Dad's and Mom's profession. Also aware of the importance of education for good earnings over a lifetime. He learns AP economics at school and asked me some intelligent questions. We discussed about mean family income, why some students get reduced price lunch and some dont. Being good bogleheads (before we were bogleheads) we always lived below our means. Our kids never asked and we never told them. Now fully mature adults, they have never asked about net worth and we've never told them. I'm sure they know we're 'comfortable' but I think they'd be surprised how much they'll inherit. If one of them became curious for a good reason to know, I'm sure we'd tell that one and then the others as well. It's not a secret, just not something we think they need to know. BTW - that's how we were teated by our parents, which I think is highly predictive of how children act as they grow up. If my kids start to ask what we make or what our house is worth, I will start to look around and figure out whether something is amiss, because generally normal kids shouldn't be concerned about such things. That's not to say every kid who asks such a question is screwed up -- sometimes it is just curiosity. But if there was a trend of some sort -- a red flag would go up with my wife and I. I would not lie to them, but I also would not necessarily answer the question either if they were younger than mid to late teens or so. Once they are a bit older than of course planning considerations come into play. At this point, being retired and able to live a comfortable life style, I remind them by example and by word, that the way I got there was by dollar cost averaging from EVERY paycheck. I didn't have an inheritance. Do you tell them your net worth? As long as you have one kid who thinks that because you have more, then you should share it, then I would say no. This leads to the other fun clarifying question: What would you do if you won the lottery? Say 50 Million. My wife would give each of the kids a large chunk. I think this takes incentives away. I have asked many people this and the answers highlight the differences couples have in the way they deal with money. DaveS wrote:Interestingly I just finished reading Swedroe.Right financial Plan. In it he says that a big reason, though not the only reason, why estate plans fail is that parents did not talk with heirs about what they had, and wanted, so as to prepare heir's for managing assets to be inherited. He goes so far as to say children should help write your investment policy statement. Failing to plan, is planning to fail. Think about it. Dave Dave: This is exactly the reason why we plan to be up front and honest with our son. I'm reading James E. Hughes' Family Wealth, since we're interested in changing our family tree and looking into generational planning strategies. One theme that keeps popping up about wealth dissipation across generations is that the first generation does not realize the importance of both intellectual and human capital development alongside financial capital accumulation when it comes to preserving 'family wealth'. People think about money only when it comes to wealth - but they don't realize that money has been made by the transformation of one's intelligence, talent, time and effort. It is a myth that children of the rich are more inclined to become lazy, unmotivated, or entitled - but it is very possible that parents are too busy focusing on their financial asset accumulation and ignore their family/children's intellectual and human asset development. There are plenty of 'rich kids' or 'trust fund babies' who have started and operate successful businesses. [We know of one, personally, and this person certainly never ever has to work a day in his life if he doesn't want to - but he's constantly busy with projects and businesses he enjoys.]. My teenage son never asked me about it, and that actually worries me a little bit. We live a very modest life style but we do take vacations from time to time, and the son got everything he needs (he never had any excessive request). We paid everything for his college. So guess he doesn't have a motivation to ask for our net worth yet, but just assume that we're doing fine and he'll get what he does need. The concern is that I still have not found a good way to educate him on managing personal finance, since he's entirely dependent on us for now. Our adult kids are aware that they are the sole beneficiaries of estates. They understand that they will not become beneficiaries until both a healthy DW and I are underground. I have made it clear/vague that we have sacrificed and invested well over the years instead of living an extravagant life style as many of our friends and family have. They understand that we will be very comfortable financially for the rest of our lives (25 years +?) and they will not have to worry about having to support us in our old age. I think that this is a pretty good balance. I figure I'll respond because I have a different real life take on it. I'm in my upper 20s and my parents in their mid-60s. My father was in uniformed service, and I first determined his salary when I was probably 12 and found it on the internet. I could make a guess at their network growing up, but it wasn't something explicitly shared. I did help my dad with his taxes and balancing his checkbook from around 14. I first found out my parents networth when my grandmother passed 10 years ago and left a modest inheritance to my dad. Although it was my mom who said the number. Since then, I've sat down with my dad every other year to go over his investments and where he keeps the documentation - we live quite a ways apart. I'm sure I'll take over finances for my mom if my dad were to pass, so I assume that is why he does it. My parents live well within their means (my dad is still working at mid 60s), so may have money left to leave, but I hope not. I hope they live long enough to spend it all aside from what they already plan to bequest in their will, which I have a copy as as well. On the other hand, my parents don't know what I currently make. They know my previous salary, so can guess the range. My mom asks me at least yearly but I choose not to tell them. She does the same with my networth, but I will only give a very rough range of that. Sscritic wrote:When my daughter was a pre-teen,.I used to test her on 60s rock; she was required to recognize Chuck Berry, Ricky Nelson, and Elvis by sound (including songs she had never heard before). I could have written either of those (except substitute Beatles and Stones for the Ricky Nelson part). My kids are 17, 15 and 11. They know I'm a lawyer, and that I enjoy Bogleheads and spend relatively much time thinking about investments. I've never told them what I make or how much we have, but they're not stupid. The oldest, at least, knows that we're not applying for college financial aid despite frequent advice to do so, and all know that college money has been set aside for each of them. They have all been warned to prepare for independence: that they are not going to live in their old bedrooms after college. As they become self-sufficient adults, I expect to share more with them about what we have and how it's invested. I figure to be an open book to them by the time they are in their 30's and mortality becomes more than a statistical blip (although wife and I are both healthy). In the meantime, I do talk with them (and the wife) about what I have learned on this board: why we invest in index funds, the importance of asset allocation and reducing costs, and things that are happening in the financial markets. The youngest associates index funds with a conversation we had about betting on coin flips in a particular restaurant (index fund = more coins to bet on --> lower variance). If I raise three little Bogleheads, I will have served them well. A little family context. I helped my mother manage her finances after my father died. I took over the task entirely when she was not longer mentally capable of doing so. As her executor, it was very helpful to me to know where everything was when she passed. I did a great deal of simplification of her financial affairs over the last ten years of her life. My wife knows very little about her parents' finances. They are both in their 90's and their health is not great and their mental acuity is noticeably waning. Our two daughters are both married and in their late 20's. They are aware that we have not had a mortgage for many years, a strategy I discussed with them, and are aware that we can afford to retire should we want to do so. They both have an idea as to the value of the real estate we own, but don't have any idea as to how much we have saved in our retirement accounts. They have some idea of what we have in our taxable accounts. We are probably within 3-5 years of full disclosure. Once my wife and I are both retired I think it will be important for them to know where all assets are located and how they are all invested. I was about 45 when I took over entirely for my mother. I was about 5 years too late. I don't want to repeat that mistake. I've named numbers to my kids occasionally, but perhaps I should mention that they are both thirty-something wageearners with 401(k)s and families and such. When the kids were growing up, I dropped broad hints. One of the most valuable exercises I ever had occurred in, I think it was junior high school, seventh or eighth grade, when we were given the task of 'making a budget for a family that earns $5,000 a year.' (This was in the late fifties). It was extremely valuable in itself. And it forced me to seek help from my mother and find out the cost of a lot of things I'd never tried to price out. I grew up in a wealthy suburb, and my mother had to do a lot of headscratching. Somewhere quite early in the project, she said, 'Oh, dear, you know we live on a lot more than $5,000 a year so it's a little hard to know how you'd handle things on five thousand.' Eventually I pressed, and she allowed as how 'we live as if we were making about fifteen thousand a year.' Our family was always pretty closed mouthed about finances and wages. I do however, remember a little celebration when my dad got a raise to 60 cents an hour. Wow, a penny a minute - 12 candy bars per hour, that was worth celebrating. Later though, I never knew his income or wealth - and he never knew mine. My boys never knew how much I made either, though they often tell me how much they make - seeking dad's approval I guess. They are in their mid-forties now. I've told them they will probably inherit about X. One will probably retire immediately, the other will probably continue to slave away! Fortunately, DW and I live on a well lit street and the alarm system works. I think it's best not to tell them. My husband's daughter worked for him in his business, (which he has since sold)and as such knew exactly how much he is 'worth' and that she will inherit half of it (her brother inherits the other half and doesn't know, or want to know, how much he may inherit). She has, therefor,made extremely foolish financial decisions, knowing she doesn't have to save for retirement or anything else because she is pretty sure about how much she will inherit, and her dad is not in good health. He told me he regrets letting her know his finances. Cloud wrote:I don't think they're old enough to know your net worth until they're in their 40's. Blanket rules are always a bit short sighted. When I'm in my mid 40s, my parents will be in their mid 80s. By then one or both may be mentally incapable of making decisions, dead, or any other range of issues that effect older people, especially getting preyed up by scam artists. I hope that my parents mental capacity wont ever degenerate to that point, but hoping is a very poor form of planning. Every person is going to be different about when they start becoming responsible with regards to financial matters, and that is probably the best starting point for easing knowledge into them. It shouldn't surprise me that 75% of the answers are no, given how often I see the sentiment of 'I started with nothing and did ok, so can they'. It is certainly everyone's freedom to take their money to the grave with them, or bequeath it to a charity; however, nothing in that prevents you from having intelligent discussions at appropriate maturity levels with your children to help them understand the same values that you find important. If you try to raise your children with the same moral values that you find appropriate, why does that change when the values are financial? Right now since my boy is only 13 - I'd never tell him, except to give vague references to teach him to save and take care of himself. I have no idea what my parents are worth except I know my mom has diddly squat for her age and my dad is at least 'comfortable' in his frugal, semi-retired lifestyle. Neither one did much of anything to save for their futures until they were in their 40s. Saw my dad's Social Security annual statement once a couple years ago. He peaked the year before his semi-retirement at age 60 at less than half what I was making at the time.so the American dream is still alive and well. When most people hear about cloud mining, they either think it's cheap endless passive income or a scam that can never be profitable. The truth however like always is somewhere in the middle. In this article I will try to show you a different perspective on cloud mining. First, I will show you which factors you should consider when buying cloud mining contracts. Then I will test and compare all the largest providers so you can make sure you always buy into the most profitable option! CryptoRival: The place to calculate the profitability of mining cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Zcash, Monero and Litecoin. Compare cryptocurrency cloud mining companies, read reviews on each of them, learn about what digital currencies are and how to mine them and find out the best. MinerGate is very interesting Mining pool with it's own a different coin before bitcoin but some like BCN the key as well as the wallet address, MINERGATE is a. Minergate best mining pool for all coins,like bitcoin,ethereum coin,dashcoin ASIC Bitcoin Mining Software; Bitcoin Cloud Minergate Review: Offers both pool and. You can find the comparison in. When considering to buy a cloud mining contract you need to take the following 8 things into account: • Legitimacy of the company • Simple ROI • Bitcoin mining difficulty • Bitcoin block reward halving • Maintenance Fee% • Bitcoin mining vs bitcoin holding • Real ROI If you invested in cloud mining and don't understand half of the terms mentioned above I would strongly recommend you read the full post. Legitimacy of the company When I just started my whole crypto adventure I figured quite quickly that at the time zcash was a profitable coin to mine. So of course I googled a zcash cloud mining contract and it existed! A crappy site nobody ever heard of called zcashminer.com offered lifetime contracts with ROI in 40 days! That seemed like a great idea for me! So I decided to invest 40 dollar which I of course never saw again. In the crypto world you can't be too careful, even large corporations are often scams. This is why you must always make sure you invest in a well known and transparent organization. Genesis-mining, bitcoin.pool and Hashflare are in my opinion the most trusted options. Simple ROI This is often the only thing people look at when investing in cloud mining and often a misleading factor. They look at what they make a day and how much the contract costs and then calculate how many days it would cost them to make back their money. This however doesn't takes into account the mining difficulty and the bitcoin price fluctuation. BTC mining difficulty As more and more people invest in bitcoin mining, the difficulty to mine a block increases. If you still have now idea how bitcoin actually works after investing half your life savings in it, I would watch, it explains very well how bitcoin works. If you are too lazy to watch the video, it basically comes down to this: The more people that invest in bitcoin mining, the less everyone gets. In my sheet I calculated from personal experience during the last 5 months how much% of my income I daily loss due to increased mining difficulty. For me this came down to 0.12% loss per day (I will keep updating this in the spreadsheet). Bitcoin block reward halving As you can see on it will take about 1039 days for the bitcoin rewards to halve. Yes, this means that after 1039 days your cloud contracts rewards will also halve. There is a good chance that when this happens cloud mining becomes unprofitable and your contract will end. However, If your pool pays out the bitcoin mining fee's and or if the difficulty doesn't grow faster than the bitcoin price it is very likely that the contracts will stay active a longer time. Maintenance fee% Once the maintenance fee becomes more expensive than the daily turnover, your contract will end. This means that the more efficient contracts with a lower percentage of its profits going to the fee's, will stay active the longer and thus generate bitcoins for a longer period. BTC mining vs BTC holding If you invest in cloud mining you should always compare between just holding bitcoins and your cloud mining contract. Why would you invest in cloud mining if in the end holding bitcoin would have been more profitable? In the end, the goal is to get ROI in terms of BTC and not in terms of dollars. Real ROI When calculating a simple ROI you don't take into account that your daily profits decrease every day. In the real ROI you do take this into account. Making real ROI means that you gained more bitcoins from the contract than initially invested in it which means you gained more in value than when you would have just kept your bitcoins. Genesis-mining is the largest cloud mine provider. Although they had some pay-out problems lately I still see them as one of the most trusted parties in the industry. Their bitcoin lifetime contracts are however not as profitable as their competitors. Discount code: eapSXt Bitcoin.com is one of the largest bitcoin media companies with one of the largest mining pools. They recently opened their cloud mining contracts. When they just started they payed out 120% and the contract was just $129- per TH. This made them at the time the most profitable cloud mining provider. By now they decreased their pay-outs to 100% and started charging $169,- instead of $129,- per TH which makes them more costly than its competitors. Once the mining fee's will increase they will consider raising their pay-outs to 120% again, this would make them a lot more competitive. Discount code: rj686Z Hashflare is currently my favourite choice. It is also a well trusted transparent organization active for a long time in the industry (like genesis-mining). In the sheet you can see that they have the most competitive pricing for 1TH. On top of that, Hashflare is the only provider that allows its customers to choose which pool to mine from. In my sheet you can see that if the bitcoin difficulty keeps increasing with the same speed as it did during the last 5 months, you can currently triple your bitcoins with the Hashflare cloud mining contract in less than 3 years. Minergate is a smaller organisation with less time in the industry. However although they are a smaller and less known party, I am personally convinced they are trustworthy. As you can see in the sheet, they are one of the most expensive and most inefficient cloud mining providers. What I really love about them though is their PC mining tool: On their website, you can download this mining tool. When you have an account you just have to log in and click on play. The program will then pick the most profitable coin for you and start mining it on your pc! As you can see in the picture it is very easy, all you have to do is log in to the program and click play! In this sheet I test and compare all the main cloud mining providers on all the important criteria. I calculate the expected daily income of every contract after 1, 2 and until the reward halving based on the average difficulty increase and average bitcoin price increase. After this I make an estimation of the total amount of bitcoins you will receive until the block reward halving. I will keep updating the sheet and will compare more crypto related services in later! Feel free to save and share the excel sheet with everyone who this would be useful for! For any questions, suggestions or requests, feel free to contact me! I am willing to try out services and make spreadsheets on request! Let me know what you think of this information in the comments! I've carefully traced your calculations and could compare with my simple ROI results (investment 120 USD for 1 year): invest fee earn ratio revenue maint. Profit BTC-HF 120 0.35 1.22777 0.731473 448.135 127.75 200.385 ROI, mo percent BTC-HF 4.56667 166.988 So, the most profitable now is BTC mining on HF with ROI about 4.6 months. July the situation was most profitable for LTC (pls see my ), but now LTC ROI decreased. New BTC price spike ($4300) dramatically change mining landscape. I ponder to add mining difficulty and price estimation to my calc, but you have done it well. Last updated July 13, 2017 Now that you have, your next step is to join a Bitcoin mining pool. What is a Mining Pool? Mining pools are groups of cooperating miners who agree to share block rewards in proportion to their contributed mining hash power. While mining pools are desirable to the average miner as they smooth out rewards and make them more predictable, they unfortunately concentrate power to the mining pool’s owner. Miners can, however, choose to redirect their hashing power to a different mining pool at anytime. Pool Concentration in China Before we get into the best mining pools to join, it’s important to note that. Many only have Chinese websites and support. Mining centralization in China is one of Bitcoin’s biggest issues at the moment. There are about 20 major mining pools. Broken down by the percent of hash power controlled by a pool, and the location of that pool’s company, we that Chinese pools control ~81% of the network hash rate. The Biggest Mining Pools The list below details the biggest Bitcoin mining pools. This is based on info from Blockchain’s chart: We strongly recommend new miners to join despite it not being one of the biggest pools. It was the first Bitcoin mining pool and remains one of the most reliable and trusted pools, especially for beginners. Antpool Antpool is a mining pool and owned by BitMain. Antpool mines about 25% of all blocks. BTC.top BTC.top is a private pool and cannot be joined. BTC.com BTC.com is a public mining pool that can be joined. However, we strongly recommend joining instead. Bixin Bixin is another mining pool that is based in China. It is a public pool, but unless you speak Chinese we do not recommend joining this pool. BTCC BTCC is a pool and also China’s third largest Bitcoin exchange. Its mining pool currently mines about 7% of all blocks. DiscusFish, also known as F2Pool, is based in China. F2Pool has mined about 5-6% of all blocks over the past six months. ViaBTC ViaBTC is a somewhat new mining pool that has been around for about one year. It’s targeted towards Chinese miners. BW, established in 2014, is another mining company based in China. It currently mines about 5% of all blocks. Bitclub.Network Bitclub Network is a large mining pool but. We recommend staying away from this pool. Slush was the first mining pool and currently mines about 3% of all blocks. Slush is probably one of the best and most popular mining pools despite not being one of the largest. Bitcoin Mining Pool Comparison Pool Location Fees Private Pool BitFury Georgia 0% Yes BTCC China 2-3% No Slush Pool Czech Republic 2% No Antpool China 1% No BW China 1% No The comparison chart above is just a quick reference. The location of a pool does not matter all that much. Most of the pools have servers in every country so even if the mining pool is based in China, you could connect to a server in the US, for example. Get a Bitcoin Wallet and Mining Software Before you join a mining pool you will also need and. Mining Pools vs Cloud Mining Many people read about mining pools and think it is just a group that pays out free bitcoins. This is not true! Mining pools are for people who have mining hardware to split profits. Many people get mining pools. Cloud mining is where you pay a service provider to miner for you and you get the rewards. Just Want Bitcoins? If you just want bitcoins, mining is NOT the best way to obtain coins. Buying bitcoins is the EASIEST and FASTEST way to purchase bitcoins. Get $10 worth of free bitcoins when you buy $100 or more. Which Countries Mine the most Bitcoins? Bitcoin mining tends to gravitate towards countries with cheap electricity. As Bitcoin mining is somewhat centralized, 10-15 mining companies have claimed the vast majority of network hash power. With many of these companies in the same country, only a number of countries mine and export a significant amount of bitcoins. China China mines the most bitcoins and therefore ends up “exporting” the most bitcoins. Electricity in China is very cheap and has allowed Chinese Bitcoin miners to gain a very large percentage of Bitcoin’s hash power. It’s rumored that some Chinese power companies point their excess energy towards Bitcoin mining facilities so that no energy goes to waste. China is home to many of the top Bitcoin mining companies:,,, and BW. It’s estimated that these mining pools own somewhere around 60% of Bitcoins hash power, meaning they mine about 60% of all new bitcoins. Georgia Georgia is home to, one of the largest producers of Bitcoin mining hardware and chips. BitFury currently mines about 15% of all bitcoins. Sweden Sweden is home to KnCMiner, a Bitcoin mining company based in Stockholm. Currently mines about 7.5% of all bitcoins. US The US is home to, a Bitcoin mining company based in California. 21 runs a large amount of miners, but also sells low powered bitcoin miners as part of their 21 Bitcoin computer. Most of the hash power from the 21 Bitcoin computers is pointed towards 21’s mining pool. Mines about 3% of all bitcoins. Other Countries The countries above mine about 80% of all bitcoins. The rest of the hash power is spread across the rest of the world, often pointed at smaller mining pools like (Czech Republic) and (US). • • • • • • • • • • • • • A Note on Pools While we can see which mining pools are the largest, it’s important to understand that the hash power pointed towards a mining pool isn’t necessarily owned by the mining pool itself. There are a few cases, like with BitFury and KnCMiner, where the company itself runs the mining operation but doesn’t run a mining pool. Bitcoin miners can switch mining pools easily by routing their hash power to a different pool, so the market share of pools is constantly changing. To make the list of top 10 miners, we looked at blocks found over the past 6 months using data from. The size of mining pools is constantly changing. We will do our best to keep this posted up-to-date. Note: If you cloud mine then you don’t need to select a pool; the company does this automatically. Why are Miners Important? Bitcoin miners are crucial to Bitcoin and its security. Without miners, Bitcoin would be vulnerable and easy to attack. Get this: Most Bitcoin users don’t mine. However, miners are responsible for the creation of all new bitcoins and a fascinating part of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Mining, once done on the average home computer, is now mostly done in large, specialized warehouses with. These warehouses usually direct their hashing power towards mining pools. Antpool Review Despite recent controversy, Antpool remains the largest Bitcoin mining pool in terms of its Bitcoin network hash rate. Antpool holds roughly 15% of the total hash rate of all Bitcoin mining pools. About Antpool Antpool mined its first block in March 2014, meaning that it emerged roughly four years after the first mining pool; Slushpool. Antpool is run by Bitmain Technologies Ltd., the world’s largest Bitcoin mining hardware manufacturer, and a large portion of their pool is run on Bitmain’s own mining rigs. Antpool supports p2pool and stratum mining modes with nodes that are spread all over the world to ensure stability (US, Germany, China etc.). Also, Antpool’s user interface is surprisingly slick considering that the underlying company thrives mostly off of hardware sales. How to Join Antpool The pool is free to join and the process is simple. First, you need to acquire. Then you need to download. If you need help deciding, I suggest you take a look at our and guides. Hardware is important because it determines the size of your contribution to the pool’s hash rate. Software is important because it enables you to direct your hardware’s hash power towards the pool you prefer. So make sure to make the right choice in order to optimize your rewards. Finally, sign up at to get started. What are Antpool’s Fees? Antpool claims that it does not charge any fees for using its pool. Although there is some truth to this claim, it is not 100% correct. While Antpool does not directly charge fees, it also does not disclose the Bitcoin transaction fees that are collected. Basically, clients are left in the dark. Currently, every Bitcoin block has a 12.5 BTC reward which Antpool does share with you when it finds a block. Lately, however, Bitcoin transaction fees have been rising and an additional 1-2 bitcoins are collected per block by pools. At this time, Antpool keeps 1-2 bitcoins form transaction fees for itself, which are not shared with miners who have hash power pointed toward the pool. It can be argued that these rates prevent the service from being usable for small-time and big-volume users. Consequently, some users on heed that the undisclosed fees make the service unwise to use for the time being. What is the Payout Threshold? The pool to have a payout threshold and pays out every day around 10 AM UTC. The minimum withdrawal amount is 0.0005 BTC (other say 0.001 BTC). Can you do Solo Mining on Antpool? Solo mining means you mine for bitcoins without joining a pool. So if you use Antpool you are not solo mining by default. Generally, you will receive more frequent payouts by joining a pool. What is the Controversy around Antpool? Antpool has arguably beneficial upgrades to Bitcoin for reasons based on claims that have been largely disproved. Notably, this has taken place with somewhat of a vindictive attitude. More specifically, the controversy revolves around Segwit – a feature that requires miner activation to be enabled. Despite the fact that most Bitcoin users want this feature activated, Antpool, among other pools, appears to be blocking this feature. Antpool began signalling for Bitcoin Unlimited in early March 2017 for reasons that have not been elucidated by Bitmain CEO (and cofounder Jihan Wu). That it will only signal for Segwit if there is a hardfork, which is a proposition that most users oppose. Furthermore, allegations that the owner refuses to sell hardware to Segwit supporters have also begun to circulate. By using Antpool, you allow the pool to decide your hardware’s approach to these matters, meaning that the pool that you used dictates the type of Bitcoin protocol that your hardware employs. If you wish to decide which implementation your hardware should signal for, you can use a pool that leaves the choice to its users, like the Slush mining pool. Bitfury Information According to, is the third largest Bitcoin mining pool and mines about 11% of all blocks. The main difference between the Bitfury pool and other mining pools is that Bitfury is a private pool. Bitfury, the company, makes its own and runs its own pool. So, unlike Slush or Antpool, Bitfury cannot be joined if you run mining hardware at home. Bitfury 16nm ASIC Chip Unrelated to its pool, a 16nm ASIC mining chip. Although Bitfury controls a large portion of the Bitcoin network hash rate, its committed to making Bitcoin: BitFury is fundamentally committed to being a responsible player in the Bitcoin community and we want to work with all integrated partners and resellers to make our unique technology widely available ensuring that the network remains decentralized and we move into the exhash era together. Valery Vavilov, CEO of BitFury BTCC Mining Pool Review is run by BTCC, a Bitcoin company based in China. The company also runs a Bitcoin exchange, wallet, prints physical bitcoins and more! Worldwide Servers BTCC all over the world so your mining hardware can connect easily to the BTCC pool. So even though BTCC is based in China, don’t be worried that you can’t use or join the pool: Our mining pool currently has customers from the United States, South America, Europe, China, and Africa. Bobby Lee, BTCC CEO Shared Transaction Fees One great thing about BTCC pool is that it shares Bitcoin transaction fees with its miners. In every Bitcoin block, around 1-2 BTC worth of transaction fees are also rewarded to the pool. Some pools keep these fees for themselves and DO NOT share with their miners! BTCC evenly splits the transaction fees among its miners, just like it splits the 12.5 BTC reward. Slush Pool Review is run by and was the world’s first ever Bitcoin mining pool. It’s advanced yet also a great pool for beginners. How to Join and Use Slush Pool Slush Pool is easy to join. • Configure your to point your to Slush Pool. • Enter your address that will receive the payouts. Slush Mining Pool URLs According to, there are the current URLs for the mining pool. You will want to point your software towards the URL location closest to you. This will maximize your mining profits. USA, east coast: stratum+tcp://us-east.stratum.slushpool.com:3333 Europe stratum+tcp://eu.stratum.slushpool.com:3333 China, mainland stratum+tcp://cn.stratum.slushpool.com:3333 stratum+tcp://cn.stratum.slushpool.com:443 Asia-Pacific/Singapore: stratum+tcp://sg.stratum.slushpool.com:3333 What are Slush Pool’s Fees? Slush Pool charges 2% of all payouts. This may seem like a lot but unlike other pools it shares the transaction fees with its miners. At current levels, these amount to 1-2 BTC more per block. Satoshi Labs Satoshi Labs runs Slush Pool. They also make the Bitcoin TREZOR hardware wallet and Coinmap.org. • None • None Average score *! Average: 1.5 Article score: FA (10) FL (10) A (9) GA (8) B (7) C (5) Start (3) Stub (1) Unassessed (0) Others (—) Book score: FA (10–9.5) A (9.4–8.5) GA (8.4–7.5) B (7.4–6.1) C (6.0–4.1) Start (4.0–2.1) Stub (2.0–0) media is excluded when the book is ordered. This is not necessarily a problem. Just make sure that the absence of this content does not cause a problem with the text, such as 'As seen in the above [fair use] picture.' Consider replacing them with free media from if possible. This is not an assessment of the quality of the book as a whole, but rather a rough estimate of the average quality of the articles therein. Books with high averages may be missing content or suffer other problems. Conversely, books with low averages may contain articles with outdated assessments, or articles which may never grow beyond a certain limit simply because there is not a lot to say about them. 0 0 0 2 5 40 134 98 1 220 0 Book reports are automatically updated by (last run: ). Report bugs and suggestions for improvements to. For bugs and suggestions concerning Citation bot, report them to. Production is a process of workers combining various material inputs and immaterial inputs (plans, know-how) in order to make something for consumption (the output). It is the act of creating output, a good or service which has value and contributes to the utility of individuals.[1] Economic well-being is created in a production process, meaning all economic activities that aim directly or indirectly to satisfy human wants and needs. The degree to which the needs are satisfied is often accepted as a measure of economic well-being. In production there are two features which explain increasing economic well-being. They are improving quality-price-ratio of goods and services and increasing incomes from growing and more efficient market production. The most important forms of production are market production public production household production In principle there are two main activities in an economy, production and consumption. Similarly there are two kinds of actors, producers and consumers. Well-being is made possible by efficient production and by the interaction between producers and consumers. In the interaction, consumers can be identified in two roles both of which generate well-being. Consumers can be both customers of the producers and suppliers to the producers. The customers’ well-being arises from the commodities they are buying and the suppliers’ well-being is related to the income they receive as compensation for the production inputs they have delivered to the producers. Production output is created in the real process, gains of production are distributed in the income distribution process and these two processes constitute the production process. The Ultimate Computer Acronyms Archive www.acronyms.ch Last updated: October 22, 2011 «I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Milford, NH. In the booth next to me are two. The production process and its sub-processes, the real process and income distribution process occur simultaneously, and only the production process is identifiable and measurable by the traditional accounting practices. The real process and income distribution process can be identified and measured by extra calculation, and this is why they need to be analyzed separately in order to understand the logic of production and its performance. The differences between the absolute and average performance measures can be illustrated by the following graph showing marginal and average productivity. The figure is a traditional expression of average productivity and marginal productivity. The maximum for production performance is achieved at the volume where marginal productivity is zero. The maximum for production performance is the maximum of the real incomes. In this illustrative example the maximum real income is achieved, when the production volume is 7.5 units. The maximum average productivity is reached when the production volume is 3.0 units. It is worth noting that the maximum average productivity is not the same as the maximum of real income. A model [3] used here is a typical production analysis model by help of which it is possible to calculate the outcome of the real process, income distribution process and production process. The starting point is a profitability calculation using surplus value as a criterion of profitability. The surplus value calculation is the only valid measure for understanding the connection between profitability and productivity or understanding the connection between real process and production process. A valid measurement of total productivity necessitates considering all production inputs, and the surplus value calculation is the only calculation to conform to the requirement. If we omit an input in productivity or income accounting, this means that the omitted input can be used unlimitedly in production without any cost impact on accounting results. You should just test mining some zcash to see. The GPU temperature. SOLUTION: cloud mining aka using Amazon’s cloud servers. Since GPU mining is set to be 100x more efficient than CPU with Ethereum, we need to look to renting GPU power on the cloud. The answer, apparently, is Amazon Web services EC2. EthOS Mining OS ethOS is a 64-bit linux OS that mines Ethereum, Zcash, Monero, and other GPU-minable coins. Altcoins can be autotraded to Bitcoin. Please see the for documentation and answers to common questions. There are 74,901 ethOS rigs mining on 453,266 GPUs. Buy it Now • ethOS is • Buy it at • You must buy one ethOS for each rig on which you plan to use ethOS. Features • Boots and mines: Automatic IP/hostname assignment, no need to install any drivers, configure XWindows, or compile any software. • Supports up to 16 AMD RX Series GPUs: Including support for RX Series voltage control and Z170/X/Z270/X/Ryzen Chipsets. • Supports up to 16 NVIDIA GPUs: Any 2GB+ GTX 900 and GTX 1000 series. • Supports up to 8 AMD R7/R9 Series GPUs: Any 2GB+ HD 7000 series, any R9 200/300/Fury/Nano. • Supports multiple coins: Ready to mine Ethereum, Zcash, Monero and many other gpu-minable coins. • Browser-based terminal: allow setup and configuration of ethOS rigs by connecting to their IP addresses via your web browser. • Supports all hardforks and softforks: No need for extra Blockchain storage, blockchain syncing handled by pools and wallets. • Works on your hardware: Running on thousands of rigs with thousands of different components. • Remote configuration: Instruct rig to remote reboot, set core clocks, mem clocks, fan control, pool info, and other settings remotely. • Extremely lightweight: Works with weakest possible CPU made in the last 5 generations on only 2gb of ram. • GPU overheat protection: GPUs will automatically throttle or turn off if they reach temperature thresholds. • Stratum enabled: Automatically configured to mine via efficient stratum. • Automatic reporting: Web panel with detailed rig statistics, charts, and event reports (). • Easy KVM: A terminal window opens with focus on boot, no mouse required. • Easy update: Update to the latest ethOS version with a single command. • Fast startup: Fast miner startup, low disk/cpu usage, and no out-of-space issues. • Bios flashing: atiflash utility allows for quick gpu bios flashing. Development ethOS was released in February of 2016. All proceeds from ethOS sales are distributed among the development team. Home Forums > Cryptocurrencies > Mining & Cloud Mining. A profitable price and get more from the bitcoin mining. Contracts SHA-256 (bitcoin) Limited stock. There is always so much happening around digital currencies, especially. A new term, ‘Bitcoin Unlimited’, has been floating around for some time now. So what exactly is Bitcoin Unlimited? Will it result in a (forced splitting off of the currency)? (Related: ) The issue revolves around the size of the which are added to its blockchain. Blocks are files where data pertaining to the bitcoin network is permanently recorded. A block records some or all of the most recent bitcoin transactions that have not yet entered any prior blocks. Thus a block is like a page of a ledger or record book. Each time a block is ‘completed’, it gives way to the next block in the. A block is thus a permanent store of records which, once written, cannot be altered or removed. (Related: ) Bitcoin blocks have a limited ‘storage’ capacity of 1MB since the beginning and under the current popular system of Bitcoin Core. However, Bitcoin Unlimited argues that the size of these blocks should be increased as it would enable smoother running by decongesting the blocks. Unlike the present rigid size of 1MB, Bitcoin Unlimited advocates complete freedom and flexibility to increase the size of blockchain and this will be done by miners. So, if there is a consensus on this, we will have a new bitcoin blockchain with large-sized blocks. Opponents feel that increasing the size of blocks can result in a hard fork in the code which would split the network. They also believe that such flexibility can result in miners opting for bigger and bigger blocks – making it harder for miners with limited resources to mine, thereby concentrating the ‘mining power’ in the hands of few miners. Such concentration will essentially result in centralization which is opposite to the idea of decentralization which is core to bitcoin. While proponents of Bitcoin Unlimited claim that they will not fork the blockchain, they do that “If some other entity causes a fork, if for example miners start producing > 1MB blocks, then Bitcoin Unlimited nodes will follow the most-work (generally the longest) fork. This means that your BU node will track the mining majority rather than a specific choice.” In the current situation, if Bitcoin Unlimited wants to have its way, they need majority nodes on their side or else, any attempt to change the size of the block will be rejected by ‘majority’ nodes. Commenting on the situation, Mahin Gupta, co-founder and CTO, Zebpay told Investopedia that, “For a hard fork to happen in bitcoin, Bitcoin Unlimited miners needs to increase the block size on their own. At the moment majority of network will reject such blocks, so until the Bitcoin Unlimited miners are in majority it does not make sense, and they will not do a hard fork till they don’t get consensus as it is detrimental to the entire ecosystem. Right now, at around 10% they are far from a consensus. So there is a very remote possibility of a hard fork.”. |
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