Topic: [ANN][NOTE]DNotes - Celebrating DNotes 3rd Birthday - Forum Now Open - page 39. (Read 814539 times)

Very thought provoking Alan!

Quick up date:

We have been working very hard to finish the work by the end of March - with a complete draft for final editing before publication. The cover design has been completed and approved. Everything is coming together very well. I am increasingly more confident that this will turn out to be an amazing book and a great help for many small business owners. I appreciate all the encouragement and help I have been getting from our team.

There are many great chapters but here is a sneak peek of Chapter 8 - Delegation:

Chapter 8 Delegation

“No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit for doing it.” - Andrew Carnegie

“Among all the tools available to you as an entrepreneur, there are few more powerful than the ability to delegate. In fact, delegation is considered by most experts to be one of the most effective ways to maximize productivity and optimize return on your limited human resources. It can also be the best vehicle through which you can train your employees for future leadership positions within your firm. When exercised properly, delegation can enable you and your managers to accomplish more with the same amount of available human resources. Moreover, by assigning others to do various parts of your job, you can free yourself up to focus on more important tasks, duties, and responsibilities  …..

……… Sadly, however, managers who fail to properly delegate can upset the entire structure of any company’s operations. After all, the very reason for having a manager is to ensure that other employees are better organized in a way that ensures smooth operational efficiency and maximum productivity. When managers attempt to inhibit delegation of tasks and responsibility, they short-circuit that structure and the processes that make it work. Instead of cooperating with others in management to develop plans for improvement, creating new strategies, or developing their own skill sets with new technologies and innovations, these managers end up wasting their time doing work that they should be leaving to others.”

That looks embarrassingly bad. In reality the middle class in America has been losing ground in term of earning power but not quite as bad in purchasing power, if your are not living in a major city like New York or Boston.

Wow! That is MUCH lower than I thought. Now I can justify feeling poor!

Not what I anticipated, it is much lower than I expected. This provides some justification that DNotes is heading down the right path, small business will be the key to bringing that number back up.

The disappearing wealth of the American middle-class:


1 chart every middle-class American needs to see



http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2016/03/18/1-chart-every-middle-class-american-needs-see/81966418/

Great recap Ken, I like the coinsecure naming feature to essentially send bitcoin to a name rather than fussing with a random huge bitcoin address. It's probably just as easy to send email address though, been using paypal for a long time, that has been very easy.

Bitcoin Weekly Recap 3-18-2016

21 Inc Announces Proof-of-Concept for Ping21 Grid
Indian Exchange Coinsecure to Make Wallets More User-Friendly
Microsoft Reverses Course with Apology: Bitcoin Still Acceptable Payment Option
Bitstamp: Chrome Extension Could Steal Your Bitcoin
Ether.camp Creates Hybrid ATM
USAA Integrates Coinbase into its Website Platform

http://dcebrief.com/bitcoin-weekly-recap-3-18-2016/

Personally, I think it is still too early, perhaps a year or two too early. It is still considered as extremely high risk by most professional investors. Beyond that it could become very popular, especially when the regulatory environment becomes more settled, hopefully more friendly.

Hard to imagine but so was the capabilities and computing power of Iphone in 1992 when the most advanced handheld computing devices were Apple Newton and Dauphin DTR.


Total Disruption By 2020 As Man-Machines Merge? 5 Billion Humans + 50 Bn IoT/Smart Devices + Q-BRAIN Singularity: Who Wins?

1. Everything that you see happening today between man and machines will change and metamorphose beyond recognition, in the coming 4-5 years. Expect total disruption via new Q-BRAIN enabled products and applications in terms of challenging legacy technology solutions; societal behaviours, habits and norms; global trading, finance and economics; and absolutely everything including the way we live, work and play!
 

2. With 50 billion connected devices -- many as Internet-of-Things (IoTs), Smart and Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled -- we are envisioning more than 5 devices per human being on the planet, and more than 10 devices per connected human being on the planet by 2020.  These are unprecedented numbers and represent first a doubling, then a quadrupling from 2016, within just a few years!
 

3. This brave new world by 2020 is about three major yet simultaneous evolutions: a) the presence of 4.75 billion connected humans; b) 50 billion 24/7 connected devices, many of which will be smart and artificially intelligent; and c) The fast approaching Q-BRAIN Singularity that offers revolutionary new technology platforms to business, economics and finance to cut cost and to improve the quality of trust as well as the solution manifold.
 

4. What's the Q-BRAIN Singularity about? Simply put, Quantum-Blockchain-Recursion-Artificial-Intelligence-Nano (Q-BRAIN) smart technologies coming together in our global civilisation to synthesise man and machine as one in a hybrid formulation where man becomes part machine and machine becomes part man.
 

5. In this brave new world, lies, damned lies and statistics can no longer hide the truth, as all past and present information is transparent even perhaps to the detriment of maintaining personal and state secrets, safety and security, at all times.  Yet strangely, this enhances trust as there are multiple parties from whom the truth can be garnered and corroborated.

 DK Matai

 Source: www.ATCA5000.com
 
 

According to this article there are hedge and equity funds ready to invest in digital currency:


Family Offices See Legitimacy in Securitized Bitcoin Investments

Investors with over $1tn in assets under management gathered at an event last night to judge if bitcoin is ready to be recognized as a mainstream asset class.

Onstage, the event looked like countless other bitcoin demo days, but it was what transpired between the panelists and the audience of 110 estimated family offices investors, hedge fund investors and private equity firms that gave it a decidedly different twist.

Myles Edwards, who represents ultra-high net-worth individuals and co-founded the New York Family Office Private Funds Roundtable, said his firm organized the event to learn more about digital currency as it is interested in a wide range of securitized investments.

Edwards told CoinDesk:

"What really intrigues us about tonight is that there is a clear synergy, a clear nexus between what’s happening in the digital world, and what’s happening in financial services. And that is going to be the catalyst to bring us to the next generation."

Edwards, who is also general counsel at financial advisory firm Shufro, Rose & Co, said he couldn’t mention specific hedge funds which had begun to securitize the assets. But he added that the high-net-worth members of the Roundtable saw the existence of such investment packages as a stamp of approval.

"There’s legitimate hedge and private equity funds that are ready to invest," he said. "They’ve done their due diligence and that's got people’s attention."

In 2014, bitcoin made headlines as the worst asset class of the year, beating out the Russian ruble, according to a widely reported Quartz article. But in 2015, the cryptocurrency was barely a blip on the best and worst investment lists of the year, leading to an even steadier 2016.

So far, this year bitcoin's price has fluctuated between about $458 and $358, but it has mostly hovered around its current price of $418.

Future possibilities

Hosted by blockchain consultancy firm Agentic Group at the newly opened Citco Gateway Offices on Park Avenue, three companies representing a wide range of bitcoin and blockchain services took questions from audience members.

Main concerns related to financial regulations for bitcoin investments and HIPAA compliance concerns for medical-related applications of the blockchain.

In attendance were industry-specific consultants specializing in blockcahin and cryptocurrency asset management as well as more traditional outfits, such as FINRA/SEC licensed broker dealer Young America Capital and Breckenridge Insurance Group.

Rik Willard, managing director and founder of Agentic Group, said that while some family offices remain hesitant to invest in bitcoin and blockchain-related products hedge funds are increasingly looking to the asset class on a time horizon of between two years and five years.

"You don’t hear a lot about family offices in blockchain, you don't hear of them in bitcoin, for a reason. VCs have their own way of looking at this market," said Willard. "But there’s trillions of other dollars out there looking to the future. To leave that untapped, unaddressed seemed to me pretty wasteful."

http://www.coindesk.com/family-offices-securitized-bitcoin/

Could public blockchains be the first real anti money laundering tool? Although it would make moving money across borders easier, the ability to track drug money would be greatly enhanced. Here's an old article but it's very relevant, and raises questions about the ethics of some prominent financial institutions.

---------


Awash In Cash, Drug Cartels Rely On Big Banks To Launder Profits

http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/03/20/291934724/awash-in-cash-drug-cartels-rely-on-big-banks-to-launder-profits

The Sinaloa Cartel, headquartered on Mexico's northern Pacific Coast, is constantly exploring new ways to launder its gargantuan profits. The State Department reports that Mexican trafficking organizations earn between $19 and $29 billion every year from selling marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines on the streets of American cities.

And Sinaloa is reportedly the richest, most powerful of them all, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. The capture last month of the Mexican druglord Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman has cast a spotlight on the smuggling empire he built.

One key to the Sinaloa Cartel's success has been to use the global banking system to launder all this cash.

"It's very important for them to get that money into the banking system and do so with as little scrutiny as possible," says Jim Hayes, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations for the New York office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. He was lead agent in the 2012 case that revealed how Sinaloa money men used HSBC, one of the world's largest banks, as their private vault.

ICE says in 2007 and 2008, the Sinaloa Cartel and a Colombian cartel wire-transferred $881 million in illegal drug proceeds into U.S. accounts.

Huge Daily Deposits

According to a subsequent investigation by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, cartel operatives would sometimes deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in a single day using boxes designed to fit the exact dimensions of the teller's window at HSBC branches in Mexico.

The bank ignored basic anti-money laundering controls, as the investigation found. In 2007 and 2008, the bank's personnel in Mexico wired $7 billion dollars to corresponding U.S. dollar accounts in New York. These were more dollars than even larger Mexican banks wired to U.S. accounts. ICE says some of it was drug proceeds.

Yet no red flags were raised because of what a bank official later described as, a "lack of a compliance culture" in the Mexico affiliate, according to the Senate report.

Moreover, the dollar transfers earned HSBC hefty fees. The Senate investigation quoted an HSBC email lamenting how the bank would lose $2.6 billion in revenue from U.S. dollar accounts that it was forced to close because of the Mexico fiasco.

"When I was told that there could be in the billions of dollars being moved through these accounts, it was very difficult to believe," says senior ICE agent Jim Hayes. "A lot of people have asked, 'Was this complicit?' We don't believe that they (HSBC personnel) knew for certain that the money being moved was drug money, but they should have known."

A Simple Plan

In Culiacán, the prosperous capital of Sinaloa, where people live cheek by jowl with the cartel, even they were shocked that narco-dollars could be laundered so brazenly.

"You see the building, the office, the cars, the papers, the men in suits. Everything looks legal. That's what frightens us," says Javier Valdez, an author and journalist in Culiacan who writes about narcotrafficking.

"The DEA loves to sell the idea that these guys are super sophisticated criminal masterminds," says Alejandro Hope, a security analyst in Mexico City and a former federal intelligence agent. "It's so simple. It's so unsophisticated. That is what to me is the most disturbing part of this. These guys are not even trying that hard."

The consequences for ignoring the torrent of dirty money flowing into its Mexico bank vaults were severe for HSBC.

The Department of Justice levied penalties and forfeitures of $1.9 billion on the bank. Of course, with $2.6 trillion in assets, for HSBC this represented a man with a hundred dollars in his pocket paying a fine of seven cents. HSBC was also faulted for hiding prohibited transactions with nations like Iran and Cuba.

The bank emailed a statement to NPR:
"HSBC has made progress in remediating anti-money laundering sanctions compliance deficiencies. But we recognize that protecting against financial crime is an ongoing journey and we have much more to do. Since 2011, we have implemented reforms and new controls, enhanced our monitoring systems, and strengthened and expanded our global financial crime and compliance organization. For example, the number of fulltime employees in financial crime and regulatory compliance is up 54 percent between 2012 and 2013."

ICE agent Jim Hayes says fallout from the HSBC case continues.

"We think this forfeiture is significant enough to make other banks to look and make sure they're in compliance," he says.

Banks Still Vulnerable

In the wake of HSBC, other banks boosted their anti-money laundering budgets, increased know-your-customer rules, and in some cases dumped high-risk clients.

Which might make you think, well, now they've got money laundering under control.

"Despite all of the efforts, banks are still vulnerable to money laundering and it's kind of an age-old thing," says Kieran Beer, editor of the news website of theAssociation of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists.

"The drug trade is overwhelming in terms of how that money finds paths—like water — to come into the global financial system," Beer continues.

HSBC wasn't the first or last bank money-laundering scandal.

In 2010, prosecutors detailed howWachovia Bank had been used by Mexican currency exchange houses to launder at least $110 million in drug profits.

In 2012, The Wall Street Journalreported on an FBI affidavit that laid out how the Zetas Cartel used Bank of America to launder cash through a racehorse operation in Texas.

And last month, Western Union agreed to do more to beef up vulnerabilities in its money transfer business along the southwest border.

Back in Culiacán, and throughout Mexico, currency exchange houses operate under strict new rules that are supposed to limit the size of dollar transactions, investigators are watching to see what the narcos next money-laundering ploy will be.

Not to downplay it, but I suspect that is a spike from like a multipool. Many of them go network hopping. Right now it's just over 20.

That's huge! The highest I've ever seen it before was slightly over 20 GH/s

wow take a look at mining hash

Current Difficulty    181.0183317
Est. Next Difficulty    848.52342982 (Change in 1 Blocks)

 Network Hashrate: 60.74 GH/s
Block Reward: 22.5625
Blocks: 1,091,506


DNotes is flying  

I personally believe the more interaction and utilization we have with the tech, from blockchain data and smart contracts to more centralized systems, the more groundwork is being laid for digital currency and the more everyone will be open to using it as a global supplemental currency.

Great article. Does this mean that the financial institutions that are fighting so hard to distinguish their blockchain from bitcoin, are inadvertently laying the groundwork for cryptocurrencies to be used within their systems? 

http://dcebrief.com/blockchain-may-reach-mainstream-sooner-than-many-think/

Agreed RJF, excellent job! Great message, great story, and inspiring.