Simply math and logic, decentralized, limited supply, institutional FOMO…

Bitcoin’s immutable monetary policy makes it a very attractive contender for better money… if not the best. #FewUnderstand ~ Jason Chew, Bitcoin Malaysia #1 Group

If Bitcoin (BTC) is destined to be
the digital gold,
this is the gap it has to / is going to fill.

Supply and Demand

Amount of gold is not finite
as people tend to believe.

Bitcoin is transparently finite,
pure mathematics and logic
verifiable via public ledger.

Originality and Scarcity

Gold is scarce,
but it will never be ‘provably’ scarce.
Few understand the difference.

As Bitcoin becomes more mainstream
people are starting to understand
why the underlying technology
is so groundbreaking and
it is this hard cap of 21 Million bitcoins
that separates it from anything
the world has ever seen before.

Originality creates value.
Scarcity protects it.

从短期来看，比特币经历了从计算机代码逐步演变为准国际货币的过程，比特币占国际储备份额可能升至1%左右，比特币的合理价格在6000至7500美元左右。

从中期来看，比特币占国际储备份额比重可能升至日元的水平，那么比特币的合理价格在2.3至3万美元左右。

长期来看，如果比特币有机会发展成为最重要的国际储备货币，那么比特币的价格可能升至40万美元以上。

比特币的出现表明区块链要得到关注，但比特币不要随便进入，因为这些新生事物都有很大的不确定性。

DYOR – Do Your Own Research.

The post Bitcoin, Digital Gold 2.0? appeared first on Blockchain Insider.

Programmable money represents a historic shift on how we perceive and use money.

Programmable money is money with constraints.

Technically, programmable money is digital currency attached to blockchain-enabled smart contracts. #CBDC

An analogy is food stamps where recipients are given coupons, the equivalent of money, which can be spent only on food — not on alcohol, betting on horses, lottery tickets or anything else.

I could create digital currency that can only be held by credentialed refugees and transferred to credentialed businesses.

“A charity or refugee agency can issue the credential to the refugee. The businesses can be similarly accredited. Then the programmed tokens representing funds can be issued to the refugee and held on his/her phone. The refugee can use them to pay for goods and services from accredited businesses, only. The refugee could also transfer them to other refugees.”

A programmable token could strengthen controls around aid payments, tracking and tracing flows on a national level, using link analysis to uncover fraud and corruption. #CCT

Where are payments going? Why is so much flowing to one place? “That’s the real promise,” said Rosenoer — rooting out the institutional corruption that keeps poor people poor. The developing world needs a tool like this — much more so than the U.S. or Europe “where lots of things are [already] good enough.”

Use case (social):

Programmable tokens can be used to help achieve environmental goals like ridding the world’s oceans of plastic waste. During a coastal cleanup last year of the Manila Bay, for example, local fishermen collected 3 tons of trash — most of it plastic — and were paid for their labor with an Ethereum-based ERC-20 token. Coins.ph (a partner on the ground) helped to convert the crypto into fiat currency. Efforts like these appear to offer an ingenious solution to two seemingly intractable problems: poverty in the developing world and ocean plastic waste.

The future of programmable money – you and I will be able to write code attached directly to our money, dictating its behavior and movements.

Use case (finance): Automated payable/receivable statement

Programmable money could enable global financial transactions that preserve compliance with local laws and regulations, suggested Rosenoer: “Assume that you have a tokenized asset that you want to sell. Let’s call it a long-term debt. The law says that I can only sell it to an accredited investor — one that has a certain amount of net assets and annual income — or I can sell it to a foreign investor.” These are classes of people defined by law. If Rosenoer sells his asset to them, they may have to hold the asset for a period of time if they are subject to U.S. jurisdiction, and then they can only sell to an accredited investor or a foreign investor.

“I can program my token to ensure that whoever holds it meets these requirements,” continued Rosenoer.

This means that I do not have to, for example, create whitelists and blacklists. The token carries the restriction and someone else can issue the credential that meets the requirement(s).

The post Programmable Money appeared first on Blockchain Insider.

Just imagine really cheap renewable energy driving down cost of everything, and efficient distribution of wealth through emerging technologies.

We are most likely the generation blessed enough to witness a new monetary system in our life span, though not that of a money-less society as portrayed in Star Trek: First Contact (1996). 

Note: Thank you bro Rashdan Ramlee for the input.

A Money-less Society

As written in Blockchain Insider chapter 1: Blockchain, Bitcoin, Money:

A new kind of trust will be implemented, as we are moving towards a moneyless society.

Our upcoming generations shall see a ​moneyless​ future.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th century.

Lily Sloane: No money? You mean, you don’t get paid?

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity. Actually, we’re all like yourself and Dr. Cochrane.

~ Star Trek: First Contact (1996)17

While the future remains unknown, it is quite promising.

News Background: China starts major trial of state-run digital currency

The e-RMB has reportedly been adopted into the monetary systems of several cities.

A sovereign digital currency provides a functional alternative to the dollar settlement system and blunts the impact of any sanctions or threats of exclusion both at a country and company level.

It may also facilitate integration into globally traded currency markets with a reduced risk of politically inspired disruption.”

China Daily report

Reported by Lillian Yang, The Guardian

Image from Other Perspectives

The post A Post-Scarcity Society appeared first on Blockchain Insider.

The green bond market is growing at a fast pace and has already reached over $240 billion.

While Africa and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, are recognized as the most promising markets for green bonds, the issuance volume remains comparably low due to the lack of trust and clear guidelines on green bonds issuance, as well as a lack of investor awareness.

The logic of any existing or future green bond framework or methodology can be described in the form of smart contracts and their integration with impact monitoring solutions. The impact is then automatically monitored, recorded on a blockchain with high transparency and immutability, and then attributed to the relevant financier. This opens doors to the issuance of programmable SDG bonds and blended finance instruments with their financial parameters linked to the impact data acquired directly from the project site.

Above notes excerpted from the article: Finding Digital Answers to Global Sustainability Threats By CoinTelegraph’s Guest Authors Alexey Shadrin, Tom Baumann, Marina Spitsyna and Miroslav Polzer.

Interesting enough, some hints from the cover of one of the recent issue of The Economist:

Islamic Green Finance – Blockchaining Sukuk

While Malaysia and the World Bank had successfully launched and proceed with a Green Bond project on Solar Energy farm, it is time for us to move further by implementing Emerging Technology to the working of it.

The key is to get a pilot project on this and deliver the PoC asap so we can move to the real market use on a wider scale.

Here’s my 2 sats about Blockchaining Sukuk, part of the content for a previous briefing to World Bank Group Malaysia Global Knowledge and Research Hub:

Programmable Money

What makes things more interesting is the technology ennoblement.

What we have now is truly border-less, programmable money backed by immutable computer systems based on pure logic & mathematics.

As what had been brought up in the topic “Do We Need A Nation-State Backed Crypto Exchange?“, money is a topic not to be missed.

Excerpt from the book by H.G.Wells:

There is one aspect of money to which the majority of those that discuss it seem to be incurably blind.

You cannot have a theory of money or any plan about money by itself in the air.

Money is not a thing in itself; it is a working part of an economic system.

Money varies in its nature with the laws and ideas of property in a community.

As a community moves towards collectivism and communism, for example, money simplifies out. Money is a necessary in a communism as it is in any other system, but its function therein is at its simplest.

Payment in kind to the worker gives him no freedom of choice among the goods the community produces. Money does. Money becomes the incentive that “works the worker” and nothing more.

But directly you allow individuals not only to obtain goods for consumption, but also to obtain credit to produce material for types of production outside the staple productions of the state, the question of credit and debt arises and money becomes more complicated.

With every liberation of this or that product or service from collective control to business or experimental exploitation, the play of the money system enlarges and the laws regulating what you may take for it, the company laws, bankruptcy laws and so forth increase.

In any highly developed collective system the administration will certainly have to give credits for hopeful experimental enterprises.

When the system is not collectivism, monetary operations for gain are bound to creep in and become more and more complicated.

Where most of the substantial side of life is entrusted to uncoordinated private enterprise, the intricacy of the money apparatus increases enormously.

Monetary manipulation becomes a greater and greater factor in the competitive struggle, not only between individuals and firms, but between states.

As Mr Streit himself shows, in an excellent discussion of the abandonment of the gold standard, inflation and deflation become devices in international competition.

Money becomes strategic, just as pipe lines and railways can become strategic.

Image by MichaelWuensch from Pixabay

The post Some Notes on Bond And Money appeared first on Blockchain Insider.

The key is programmable money.

What we have now is truly border-less, programmable money backed by immutable computer systems based on pure logic & mathematics.

Effective resource allocation and distribution can be achieved through cognitive AI system and business process automation.

Two Monetary World and The Exchanges

There are 2 types of exchanges related to the crypto world at the time of writing:

• Fiat Exchanges (USD), and
• Crypto-to-Crypto Exchanges

Fiat Exchanges convert your fiat currency to crypto, that means depositing USD (or your country’s currency) with an exchange in order to get BTC (Bitcoin) or ETH (Ether). Some of the famous exchanges under this category are Coinbase, CoinMama, Kraken,
CEX.io, LocalBitcoins, BitStamp, Gemini, BitFlyer etc.

Crypto-to-Crypto Exchanges are those exchanges with more options, they carry more niche currencies. Some examples are Binance, Bittrex, Cryptopia, KuCoin, Poloniex etc.

As a matter of cautious, if you’re new to crypto investing, be sure to read up on best practices for keeping your crypto secure like using two-factor authentication and moving your coins to a private wallet once you’ve purchased them.

You can get further information about the exchanges from Coin Central’s article Top Cryptocurrency Exchanges in 2018.

At the time of writing, we have yet to see any conventional or mainstream exchanges moving into the crypto space, though there had been news and rumors about Nasdaq or Switzerland’s largest stock exchange wants to offer cryptocurrencies.

Nation-State Backed Crypto Exchanges?

Do we need a nation-state level crypto exchange? Does it make sense to have one? Why would we need that in the first place?

Before we figure out what are the purposes of having a nation-state level crypto exchange, we should take a look at what can a nation-state crypto exchange do. Two of the main functions of a nation-state crypto exchange are nonetheless:

1) Create and mobilize capital in crypto form, and

2) Moving capital in between crypto and fiat systems, where the bottom line is stability

Combine the monetary part of the Blockchain (the cryptocurrency) and the technology part of it, it’s not hard to figure out that the benefits of having a nation-state level crypto exchange would be:

1) To provide real-time, transparent view of capital flows

2) An immutable ledger of capital trail for the authorities

3) Jobs creation and ripple effects to the country through the implementation of crypto economy, and

4) Effective and automated tax collection through programmable money (the cryptocurrencies)

Programmable money is the future

But, where is the money?

For instance, the creation of another entity that could be as big, or even bigger than conventional stock exchanges in some countries, such as the Bursa (counter 1818) of Malaysia, which take cares of matters related to global scale crypto and tokenized businesses listed on board.

The challenge is, how do we distribute ‘the cake’?

Excerpt from Chapter 3 of the book Blockchain Insider, Smart Money.

Notes:

At the time of writing, around 16th of August 2018, Binance LCX just launched its Fiat-to-Crypto Exchange in Liechtenstein, and Thai SEC just cleared seven cryptocurrency operators to serve clients while reviewing two more – as reported by CoinTelegraph.

News links:

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180816005660/en/Binance-LCX-Announces-Fiat-to-Crypto-Exchange-Crypto-Investors

https://www.sec.or.th/th/Pages/News/Detail_News.aspx?tg=NEWS&lg=th&news_no=89&news_yy=2561

The post Do We Need A Nation-State Backed Crypto Exchange? appeared first on Blockchain Insider.

A lot of progress happened in the Crypto world during the first quarter of 2018. As the authorities step in, two prominent figures from the financial world gave their views on the Crypto World in March 2018, coincidentally.

2 Mar, 2018 – “The Future of Money” by Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England

15 March 2018 – “Crypto Tokens: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” by Ravi Menon, Managing Director, Monetary Authority of Singapore

On the corporate and business side, Starbucks Corp. Chairman Howard Schultz believes that a trusted consumer brand with brick-and-mortar locations will help bring “legitimacy and trust” to cryptocurrencies. Which, is true, looking at how the market progress after his view was published in Bloomberg Technology in Jan 2018.

Earlier Mar 2018, the Messaging app company Telegram closed an initial $850 million in funding as part of an ICO that could bring in as much as $2 billion in total.

16 Mar 2018, Tony Fernandes, CEO of AirAsia (the $3 billion low-cost airline company in Southeast Asia) which is publicly listed in Malaysia, told TechCrunch that he is analyzing the potential to hold an ICO that would raise money by introducing its own cryptocurrency on the sidelines of Money2020 in Singapore.

What we see here is how the digital currency is evolving and how it might eventually be dominance by the authorities.

90% of today’s altcoins will vanish, replaced by trusted consumer brands’ token and eventually, sovereign cryptos backed by the governments or authorities. ~ How Tze, Blockchain Insider

Updated: 28th December, 2018

2 Articles in December 2018, one from Time magazine, one from WSJ

(1) Why Bitcoin Matters for Freedom

Innovation happens at the edge. For people living under authoritarian governments, Bitcoin can be a valuable financial tool as a censorship-resistant medium of exchange.

http://time.com/5486673/bitcoin-venezuela-authoritarian/

(2) Once a Rebel, Bitcoin Is Conforming to Mainstream Markets

The influx of money from traditional investors has led the cryptocurrency to behave more like a traditional asset

https://www.wsj.com/articles/once-a-rebel-bitcoin-is-conforming-to-mainstream-markets-11546005600

We shall see how the distribution may look like in next article.

Excerpt from the book Blockchain Insider, Chapter 3: Smart Money

Related News:

Inside Telegram’s ambitious $1.2B ICO to create the next Ethereum

AirAsia, Southeast Asia’s low-cost airline, is considering an ICO

CBDC – Central Bank-Issued Digital Currency

As reported by Coin Telegraph in an article about Reserve Bank of India considering Central Bank-Issued Digital Currency

As early as 2016, the Bank of England and the People’s Bank of China explored the idea of issuing their own digital currencies, with over 90 central banks worldwide that same year investigating DLT tech.

In 2017, the Bank of Canada published extensive research into the benefits of CBDCs, and already in the first months of 2018, banks in Malaysia, Taiwan, Poland, Switzerland, among others, have all made news with inquiries into the use of Blockchain systems.

Earlier April 2018, an R3 researcher stirred a Deconomy panel in South Korea with his prediction that wholesale CBDCs would see real-world implementation in 2018.

The post The Three Phases of Cryptocurrencies appeared first on Blockchain Insider.

In my humble opinion, as we are moving towards a moneyless society, their speeches came just in time to aware more people about the existence of the Crypto World and what we can do about it.

Both

speech given by Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England dated 2 Mar, 2018, titled “The Future of Money” (video embedded below)

and

speech given by Ravi Menon, Managing Director, Monetary Authority of Singapore dated 15 March 2018, titled “Crypto Tokens: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”

gave quite a clear understanding to the public regarding the existence of the two monetary world (illustrated in sub-topic under Chapter 3 of the book Blockchain Insider, “A Tale of Two Worlds“, which is yet to be published).

The overall progress in the financial world is good as the authorities started to look into it and understand more about Crypto related matters.

What I prefer is to blend in the best of both world.

Related topics:

Towards A Moneyless Society

A Tale of Two Worlds

The Future of Money by Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England

The post As The Regulators Steps In appeared first on Blockchain Insider.

Blockchain Insider Chapter 1 – Blockchain, Bitcoin, Money

To explore Blockchain,
you need to study Bitcoin.
To understand Bitcoin,
you need to know what is money and how it works.

The post We Have Just Uploaded Our Online Chapter to Slideshare! appeared first on Blockchain Insider.

If you were to ask me what’s the biggest picture I see in this blockchain and the advancement of the whole tech things, I would say resource allocation is at the very core of it. Of course, this is merely from my personal point of view.

There had never been a problem with the resources, the problems lie within the distribution.

It’s all about trust. To trust a small group of elite in the fiat money system or a network of computing nodes in the cryptocurrency world.

It’s the evolution of money, for now.

As a matter of caution, unscrupulous things happen everywhere. Equipped with the right knowledge and enough amount of due diligence before you dive into anything.

We shall be heading towards a world where resource allocation will become more efficient, open and fairer. Newer and more advanced technology which none of us could have ever think of at this moment may come along the way.

While a decade from now we’ll call this the blockchain boom, it could be just one of the complementing piece of puzzle besides IoT (Internet of Things), Big Data, AI (Artificial Intelligence) etc, as we evolve to a better world.

What Can We Do With Blockchain?

Blockchain promises a world without middlemen, with characteristics such as its openness, immutability, cross-border, high resistance to censorship, coercion and geopolitical manipulation.

Forget about the glamorous blockchain world we tend to see in the media, it is just part of the evolution towards the ultimate goal.

Excerpt from the book Blockchain Insider, Chapter 3 – Smart Money.

Related presentation file:

The post Towards A Moneyless Society appeared first on Blockchain Insider.

Blockchain will do to banking what the internet did to media is quite a noble statement which is easier said than done. What we have now is very early days of what might be a revolution of the ordinary against the banking cartel and governments around the world who controls nearly all the resources on planet Earth, including people.

It’s still a wild wild west out there. Bad players exist in any industry. People take advantage of loopholes in any system, even in a regulated environment. Financial crisis, housing bubbles, subprime mortgages, unsecured derivatives, dotcom crash (Nasdaq) etc etc.

Before you dive into anything, get yourself educated. Do your due diligence and make your own judgement. Anyway, it’s a democratic world with certain level of freedom.

90% of the coins out there could vanish in a matter of few years time. The case of Bittorrent, Napster, ICQ, Friendster etc did not mean that the industry is bad. That’s part of evolution, to filter out the bad and the weak in order to become stronger.

We have seen that happened with Tech IPOs. The same will happen in the Crypto world. Dejavu.

Google, Facebook, Whatsapp, Wechat, they don’t exist in the early days of the internet. Apple made a come back after some “down time”.

Bitcoin, Ethereum might be the next Yahoo, or even Kodak, with a much shorter lifespan, who knows. But the fundamental shall stay intact, which is a revolution to our current financial system, a challenge to banking cartels and governments around the world.

Adopt, embrace, or outlaw, we have a list of 200+ possibilities.

Fiat Money VS Cryptocurrency

The invention of the blockchain has given rise to a new species of currency, that of crypto currency. Existing innovations in the cryptocurrency space foreshadow the potential that currencies could be designed as such to not only act as currencies but represent other forms of value as well.

Decentralized, which implies a trust-less and distributed network, made possible through blockchain-based technology.

Image source: https://www.coindesk.com/origins-money-darwin-evolution-cryptocurrency/

What makes the money world goes round?

For any currency to be viable, be it a decentralized cryptocurrency issued by a computer program or a traditional “fiat” currency issued by a government, it must win the trust of the community using it.

The whole point of cryptocurrency is to offer an alternative model for that trust. It is part of the evolution of money.

Trust is at the core of any system of money.

Cryptocurrency systems imbue trust in an inviolable, decentralized computer program that is, in theory, incapable of defrauding people. None of this, however, gets cryptocurrencies off the hook.

They, too, must win people’s trust if they are to become relevant.

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