Topic: [ANN][NOTE]DNotes - Celebrating DNotes 3rd Birthday - Forum Now Open - page 8. (Read 814539 times)

It's nice to see law enforcement discovering that bitcoin can be their friend. 


New York Police Win FinCEN Award for Bitcoin Investigation

"... bitcoin is now seen by some law enforcement elements as easier to trace than cash."

http://www.coindesk.com/new-york-police-win-fincen-award-bitcoin-investigation/

Thanks batesresearch! The support for our project is greatly appreciated and as always, keep us in the loop with your latest projects.

Good to hear from you QiWoman! Hope you and your family get better soon and thank you for supporting the project.

Bitcoin Weekly Recap 5-13-2016

MtGox Bitcoin Addresses Will Not Be Made Public
BitBank Group Launches Funding Effort for Bitcoin Mining Facility
Malaria-Focused Charity to Accept Donations in Bitcoin
TechBureau Raises $6.2 Million in Series A Funding
New Brave Browser Offers New Browsing Options… and Controversy

http://dcebrief.com/bitcoin-weekly-recap-5-13-2016/

Thank you very much for your support and confidence in us, batesresearch. Perhaps one day, we will see each other at a conference so that you get a signed hardback copy.

Good morning, qiwoman2. It is always good to see you. I have been working on the book for a while but have been devoting most of my time on the book the last eight months. I am glad that I did it and trust that it is the best accomplishment of my life.

I often look at things from a different prospective. I believe that the more I can be of help to others, the further that I can reach out to the most people with a positive impact, the more valuable my efforts become. That is where I get my inspiration to keep going. We all will continue to have many good days but they always come with few a few challenging ones. We must always aim for the best that we can do and align ourselves with those who share that same mindset. I hope that there will be a lot more good days on your way.

With DNotes and the book, we are now in the best position to be truly purpose driven to positively impact the long struggle of many, perhaps one at a time. Many may not understand what we are doing but if DNotes were to be truly useful to the masses worldwide one day, there must be a medium to reach out to them some how. Having built a trusted brand, the book is our best medium to reach out to millions with consistent, inspiring, and compelling messages. It is a book that not only inspires entrepreneurs and their employees but also anyone who believes that mutual respect, cooperation, and collaboration are what it takes to have many more good days than challenging ones. That is the hallmark of success and happiness.   

Amazing work, shared via Twitter and of course backed on Kickstarter Shame that the hardback only ships to the US!! So grabbed myself the ebook

Your website https://fourpillarsofbusinesssuccess.com gives a good overview and I wish you the best success!

I know I haven't been on the DNOTES thread for a while now but I am going to try to actually buy the paperback copy, best way to advertise it is to buy and read ti myself and do a video campaign as well. Things have been pretty tough for myself and my family but am trying hard to snap out of it, got the ruddy flu at present lol but am always impressed with DNOTES.  

 Thanks for the update, Mark.

Safecex?

Not all campers happy, but signs of life. May be fully functional within days.

Mark

How Do You Go About Starting A Great Company?

Ideally, your goal is to create the type of company that is almost impossible for your competitors to fully replicate. The thing is, though, that you cannot do that all by yourself. However, it all has to start with you, but at some point you will have to begin to rely on a team to help you achieve your vision. Ultimately, that team will end up being one of the most important factors in determining just how successful your new enterprise will be.

While it is clearly important for any team to strive for the ultimate success of a business venture, there are far too many instances where even the best team fails to follow through on the company’s vision. Entrepreneurs routinely start out with great visions and expectations and then find that everything seems to unravel on them within just a few short years, if not earlier.

The question is why? Why do even the most visionary entrepreneurs often find their best and brightest ideas failing to gain traction in the marketplace? In some unfortunate cases, successful and established companies took a sudden turn for the worst, and failed.  Why do so many businesses fail so early? More importantly, what steps can you take now to ensure that you’re not just another one of those statistics? This book’s purpose is to answer that question and many more, while helping you develop a new way of approaching your own quest for business success.

If there is one fact that is crystal clear, it is that your vision will be central to everything you do from this point forward. To succeed, you must start with a clear and coherent vision for your business, and you must be passionate about it. That vision, however, is not your mission. It is instead the ultimate goal that guides the strategic decision-making that you employ to reach your objectives.

Do you have that vision yet? It’s fine if you don’t yet have that perfect clarity, as long as you know that you’re not fully there. Problems occur when people think that they have a vision, but later find out that they began without any real sense of the bigger picture. Too often, they discover much too late that what they had were short-term objectives and a sense of a mission, but no overriding vision to help them get to where they needed to be to achieve their ultimate goals.  In other words, many entrepreneurs simply start out focusing on the wrong elements of the success equation, and then end up wondering why their plans fail.

Start with your vision, and that will provide the destination that you are ultimately trying to reach. From there, you work on establishing initial objectives and goals that you want to achieve. Then you develop the winning strategies that can offer you the best opportunity to reach those goals. Subsequently, you learn to master the art of flawless execution of your winning strategies.  Notice, if you will that none of the team members we mentioned earlier are even a consideration at this point in the process. There’s a good reason for that: you have to create the vision, mission, and short-term goals for your company before you even think about recruiting help. Those elements have to be firmly in your mind - or better yet, documented so that you have something to which you hold yourself accountable before you ever make that first critical hire.

Only when you are done establishing your vision, mission, goals, and strategies can you actually begin to build a team. At that point, you have to find the type of competent people you believe to be most likely to buy into your business philosophy and mindset. You need people who are capable of being inspired by your exceptional leadership style and strategic vision, as that is the only way to ensure that they are in turn capable of helping you to create the type of business culture that your enterprise needs for success. That culture should motivate everyone in the company to consistently deliver their highest level of commitment and performance, and thereby contribute to the efforts to reach your business goals. Once you reach that point, you will have created a system that basically channels the mindset of its leader even when your attention is elsewhere. You will have designed a system for effectively cloning yourself.

The key, though, is to ensure that the “you” that you’re cloning is the best “you” it can be! This book is designed to help you find that best part of you, so that you can begin to build a team with the type of unified vision and purpose needed to achieve true success.

Stay tuned for more:
Meanwhile, support my Kickstarter campaign and pledge as little as $5. Many small business owners are struggling and need help. Please join me in my quest to get the word out.

Visit:  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/124571891/the-four-pillars-of-business-success-book-by-alan

For more about the book including chapter summation visit:https://fourpillarsofbusinesssuccess.com/

Target is advertising a job where bitcoin and blockchain understanding is a "desired trait". It won't be long before most jobs will require this knowledge and experience, but for the time being it is pretty cool to watch this unfold.


Target Is Hiring an Expert Who Understands Bitcoin

https://news.bitcoin.com/target-hiring-expert-understands-bitcoin/

Thanks, sure, I'm going to create a couple more variations. Probably tomorrow.

Of course, lol and thanks!

These figures are truly harrowing - even in New Zealand it is difficult. Here are some thoughts on student loans that I've observed in my own country.

The system here is a double edged sword. In the mid 2000s, the government decided to give "interest-free" student loans as an election promise. On one side this is quite helpful because people don't need to pay interest on their loans - it is a direct subsidy to students, and it makes repaying the loan easier.

The loan system here operates that once you complete university, you pay an extra 10% tax on all income above 19 thousand dollars per annum that is used to offset your loan - on the condition that you remain in the country. I sit there and consider my sister who claims to be "trapped" in her own words in NZ after 6 or 7 years in academia, six months out of the country would instantly slap her with an interest cost equivalent to 10% of her yearly after tax income. It's even worse when I consider that overseas there is no "interest-free" provision!!! People are paying these exorbitant interest costs regardless.

I don't mean to hate on academia, but like IMZ alluded to - many students brains are so "open" these days that they're falling out. Subjects at university that are now primarily used to "justify" and "direct" societal direction (economics, sociology etc) and are full of out-dated ideas that don't match the collected data, and many topics that remain (management, marketing - even sociology) are simple enough that nobody should be spending 50 thousand dollars and three years in academia to get a piece of paper that states you remembered a bunch of simple concepts. I don't mean to sound snobbish, but my personal take is that the sciences are incredibly important (and more difficult) and require degrees - but some of these "more difficult" courses like economics are permeated with questionable theories and models. Some of these models and theories are rather complex and still require good understanding of calculus and critical thinking. On the other hand, there are subjects that students should only need to read a book about, because there is nothing complex about learning "management structures and theory" or "marketing strategies".

The other flipside of New Zealand's "interest free" student loans is that it encourages LOTS of students to go to university. It clogged up the system with people who probably shouldn't be at university. This increased demand meant an even wider array of courses are offered like "Feminist theory", "intersex and transgenderism" and "gender studies" - courses that have no "philosophical" or logical rubric to be considered "academia". These topics move definitions and concepts away from what is empirical, and towards "social construct" (arbitrary belief as a result of culture and environment). Students could easily just read books privately for these topics and save 50k. While these courses provide personal value to the people who study them (which I think is great), there is near zero remunerative value in the future for having done so. The students come out with degrees that have saddled them with debt, that do not provide them any skills for employment which could help them pay it off.

So it's an interesting double-edged sword. When university is more expensive - only the brightest can afford to go because they will derive the most value from it. When it is cheaper, everybody goes and studies courses that won't provide them employment in future that will enable them to pay the debt off. I don't see any reason for a government to create incentives for less bright people to study subjects that will see them in debt for well over a decade, and no reason for the brightest students to be saddled with debt and have their potential restricted.

And again, is the point of university not to aid employers in discerning between "high productivity" workers and "low productivity" workers? Getting a degree costs 3 years of your career (lost wages), and costs perhaps 100k - a very expensive way to tell employers that you have a competitive edge. If everybody is encouraged to go to university, this distinction becomes meaningless and employers can no longer work out who the best candidates for a job are.

Doing a great job DNotes - these will be handy for posting around.

Could I recommend putting Alan's picture beside his name and book title - rather than below it?

These are awesome! Are we free to share these now? (I probably should have asked before I posted it on Twitter - lol) 

Twitter:
https://twitter.com/TFPOBS

Also I will be creating social graphics if anyone needs for sharing.

http://dcebrief.com/bitcoin-payment-card-for-the-us/

This is a good report describing the state of our industry. None of the data and conclusions surprised me.

As in any business, it always takes longer, has more problems, and cost more. My most common advice is: 1) Don't just jump in to be a "me too" 2) Learn all you can about the industry including its strengths, weakness, opportunities, and threats. (SWOT)  3) Identify others' mistakes and decide how you would do it differently. When is the most opportune time to do ... what you are working on. Trails and errors are very expensive and 60% of the time during the first five years of startups are crippling and fatal.

The report centers on 1) Bitcoin (Currency/Payments), 2) Blockchain (Non-currency). and 3) Hybrid (both)

Fair enough. Then DNotes is a Hybrid ... and a bit more. Have we confused you with DNotes Global, Inc, and the book yet? If you are don't worry, you are probably not alone. When things are done outside the box, it is harder to understand unless you follow us closely. If you read the book or at least read about the DNotes Story and the chapter summation of the book, you will get a much better idea.

We absolutely believe that the only Killer App potential is the digital currency. Why "POTENTIAL"? By itself, it is not enough to make it a Killer App. It takes years and an enormous amount investment, branding, good will, and infrastructure to gain mass acceptance for it to become a KILLER APP.

Well, meanwhile blockchain has been branded as a large offering of snake oils with blue sky potentials. However, at this time I can not use up each of my fingers to represent each use case that I would give my lunch money to invest.  May be the bankers know a little more about the blockchain technology than I do. Remote, but possible.

http://dcebrief.com/?s=DNotes+Story

https://fourpillarsofbusinesssuccess.com/
 
“Splitting industry observers is a key question – Are we just short distance (1-2 years) away from witnessing the radical, transformative effects of blockchain technology? Or is five to 10 years a more realistic timeframe before blockchain technology fully matures and achieves wide adoption?”

“As of Q1 2016, total venture capital investment in bitcoin and blockchain startups now exceeds $1.1bn."

"Perhaps more importantly, Q1 saw a sharp reversal in the multi-quarter downward investment trend, with both total investment and average deal size rebounding in the early months of the new year.”


State of Blockchain Q1 2016: Blockchain Funding Overtakes Bitcoin

Garrick Hileman (@garrickhileman) | Published on May 11, 2016 at 15:15 BST


CoinDesk’s Q1 2016 State of Blockchain report summarizes key trends, data and events from the first quarter of 2016.

As blockchain hype begins to subside and entrepreneurs and organizations get down to the business of implementation and execution, a new debate has emerged over timing.

Splitting industry observers is a key question – Are we just short distance (1-2 years) away from witnessing the radical, transformative effects of blockchain technology? Or is five to 10 years a more realistic timeframe before blockchain technology fully matures and achieves wide adoption?

Nearly two-and-a-half years have now passed since Marc Andreessen penned a widely referencedNew York Times op-ed about how bitcoin reminded him of the Internet circa 1993. His forecast suggested that it would be only a few short years before the blockchain-equivalent of Web 1.0 world-beating companies like Cisco would emerge.

In contrast, a string of voices, ranging from author and consultant Chris Skinner to financial institutions such as Morgan Stanley, have suggested that blockchain maturity and adoption is likely to take much longer than Andreessen's forecast.

In other words (and to stay with the Internet analogy), the skeptics would say blockchain adoption is actually closer to 1970s-80s Internet time, when foundational protocols like TCP/IP were invented, rather early-1990s Internet time.

Who's correct in this debate remains to be seen, but the stakes are incredibly high for an industry with over $1bn in venture capital investment.

Amidst this backdrop, we review some key trends from the quarter that was:
Venture bounce back

As of Q1 2016, total venture capital investment in bitcoin and blockchain startups now exceeds $1.1bn.
Perhaps more importantly, Q1 saw a sharp reversal in the multi-quarter downward investment trend, with both total investment and average deal size rebounding in the early months of the new year. ..
the ongoing softening observed in overall venture investment. The strong investment interest that is being shown in blockchain tech is largely responsible for the industry bucking this trend.
Investors go blockchain

The major industry story for 2015 was the increasing focus on the underlying technology of the bitcoin currency, which is commonly referred to as blockchain or distributed ledger technology (DLT).
This trend carried over into the first quarter of 2016 with a further increase in the number of traditional institutions that announced some form of blockchain initiative

As we have noted, however, there is much confusion over the term "blockchain", and this confusion has led to frustration for both those new to the technology as well as amongst more fluent observers who will often see different terms used to express the same basic idea or principle.

Read More:
http://www.coindesk.com/state-of-blockchain-q1-2016/