Topic: DNotes 2.0 - Staking, CRISP Interest, DNotes Pay - page 285. (Read 148848 times)

Japan Registers 11 Exchanges, as South Korea Bans ICOs

https://dcebrief.com/japan-registers-11-exchanges-as-south-korea-bans-icos/

Glad to see the fraudulent claims are being investigated. It will do a lot of good in helping clean up our industry.

TimMarsh, I'm glad you raised that point. I can see if you wanted to invest in real estate and only had a small amount of money to invest, or not enough to actually purchase real estate, it might make sense... But I believe there are already stocks you can purchase as a real estate investment. Without a lot of information available (or any), I can't see why one wouldn't go with the established investments.

The cleaning up of fraudulent activities is a good thing for our industry. Being ignorant or failure to do sufficient due diligent and consequently being cheated because of the swindler’s false claims and misrepresentations is not a crime. The same applies to our inherent greed and fear. Unfortunately, the laws of the land must seek to protect consumers irrespective of their sophistication or ignorance.

So, I would expect that the crack down on fraudulent activities to continue and that it would lead to more regulations and better legal guidance. I just hope that this will not lead to regulatory over-reach or so burdensome that it stifles innovations. The potential good our industry can bring about to mankind will out-weight any growing pains.

For our part, DNotes must continue to help in educating the general public and lead as a role model in doing the right things that benefit others as we strive for our own success. There is nothing wrong for being successful, including wealth accumulation. I just don't like it done at the expense of others.

There will always be greed and foolishness in investing from people who should know better. The really sad part in my opinion, is that the majority of people don't have the basic knowledge to even grasp the concept of due diligence, how to accomplish it, or why it is necessary. You are right in improving math skills, and everyone should have the opportunity to become financially literate (and literate), but understanding the complexities of real estate investment 'schemes' of any kind are likely out of the realm of comprehension for most of them, with or without education. Not offering some form of protection for these people leaves me feeling like we are no better than some of the world's wealthiest 1%, that got to where they are on the backs of innocent people.

It's really rather sad though isn't it? Clearly Zaslavskiy was not being honest by selling a product that was of no value. I'm glad that the SEC is taking action and agree with Chase that it would be great to see SEC continue on this path.

But I feel like anyone investing in tokens based on real estate value, without checking what real estate is owned already, and then hoping to make money on the increased value of said real estate, is not undertaking due diligence. I don't think anyone who bought into the real estate ICO would be satisfied with a 1%–4% increase in value annually. But that is what history tells us is the most we should expect, and that is little more than inflation or bank investments offer.
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/mortages-real-estate/11/the-truth-about-the-real-estate-market.asp
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/08/26/weekinreview/27leon_graph2.html
https://michaelbluejay.com/house/appreciation.html

Instead, I'm certain that they were hoping that a token with some real-world value attached to it would be very successful and quickly appreciate in value. But that notion just illustrates how poorly "real-world value" is understood. If US$100 million was raised in ICO, and if the ICO consortium invested all of that money in real estate purchases that didn't require legal fees, agent fees, taxes or any other normal real estate transaction cost, the consortium would own US$100 million worth of real estate. Then, if the token sold at ICO for US$1 was offered on exchanges for US$1.10, it would take a fool to buy it because the only person who would buy it from them in turn would be a greater fool. The token can never be worth more than the real estate purchased, plus real estates increase in market value, minus the sales cost.

So it is hard to feel sorry for anyone who bought a token representing real estate, and hoping to earn anything above an averaged real estate investment. And doing so in an unregulated ICO framework is less secure than some person setting up a ledger down the pub on the back of a beer coaster, asking for people to write him US$10,000 checks that he'll buy some shared property with, but refuses to tell you his name or show you identification.

I don't like people with insufficient earnings being blocked from investing in securities, or the government taking on a parental role. But when this level of foolishness is abundant enough for ICOs to foster a booming market, I almost understand the need for these controls. I'd rather see the efforts go into teaching basic mathematics though.

Let's hope the SEC continues to focus on fraudulent activities only, allowing the reputable projects to grow and better the world.


Press Release  -  SEC Exposes Two Initial Coin Offerings Purportedly Backed by Real Estate and Diamonds

https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2017-185-0

Japanese Banks May Launch New Digital Currency Called J-Coin

https://dcebrief.com/japanese-banks-may-launch-new-digital-currency-called-j-coin/

Thanks GetBABB, DNotes has some similar goals for the future. We will look into it and follow your updates and we wish you the best of luck.

You might be interested in what BABB is proposing in terms of reducing economic inclusion? It's a story of why we no longer need to rely on banks, and how BABB is going to make it happen, from its founder Rushd Averroes.

ICO is a great tool to raise start-up capital from around the world with relatively little efforts of time and other resources. It often comes with deep discount for early participants and almost instant "exit strategy" if one chooses to cash-in. Unfortunately, this has been turning out to be a power-grab - well a quick cash grab - a very attractive tool for bad actors. It is becoming a serious problem for our industry; likely to cause a regulatory over-reach including out right ban of ICOs as in the case of China and now Korea.

Reuters etc are reporting that South Korea are banning ICOs.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-southkorea-bitcoin/south-korea-bans-raising-money-through-initial-coin-offerings-idUSKCN1C408N

https://dcebrief.com/first-new-zealand-based-token-launch-using-ethereum-goes-live/

mrbum805, we appreciate your confidence and support, especially in the face of challenges.

Welcome rnayback! Thank you for joining us on the forum and the comments, it is greatly appreciated.

Nice work Tim. Your points are well made about Sirin's chances in this market. It seems they have chosen to use the ICO the way the model was intended - as a crowdfunding resource or voucher to use on their products. The interesting thing about ICOs that launch with tangible products is that they are much more stable in value. For example, the phones have a fixed cost in SRN tokens, which gives a metric to appraise their actual valuation by. By contrast, other ventures that are fundraising for the future as a startup without a working product leave the valuation of their token much more open to speculators to decide, as opposed to a valuation appraisal.

Wow again, Tim. Great work. Looks like they have already raised $97-million:

"The co-founder and president of Sirin Labs is Moshe Hogeg. He’s founder of the messaging app Yo and the photo-sharing app Mobli. With Sirin Labs, Hogeg’s raised $25-million in seed money back in 2013, then another $72-million in April of 2016 (lead by Hogeg himself).   …. The Solarin phone was set to run with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 (now replaced by newer chips a couple times over)." https://www.slashgear.com/this-blockchain-phone-is-unreal-sirin-labs-solarin-and-finney-27501900/

If they can pull off their ICO, this is an interesting one to watch. There are merits to use both hardware and software coupled with biometrics to achieve unbreakable security. However, if I have the opportunity I would approach it very differently and spend the money wisely in order the reach the masses than the elites. 

I have to admit that when I see stories like this one, where a company is making an "open, source, secure smartphone and PC", to leverage the advantages of blockchain technologies, I cringe. I remember when I first heard rumours that Google were developing an operating system for mobile phones potentially named 'Android', I was really excited. I had recognised back then the pie chart for mobile phone development costs shifting so that the software slice was becoming much more expensive than the hardware slice. And the duplication of effort was astounding. But I also knew that you'd need to be a huge company, and independent of phone manufacturers to succeed in such a big, bold project.

So yes, I was excited. I looked into how they were going to run a virtual machine which could then be configured to sit on a variety of hardware layers. I knew very little of the negotiations that would have to go on with manufacturers. But I'd followed the gaming console industry for a long time, and knew that they'd have to take great care to get a programming community on board. Google pulled it off. I was impressed. Then as with all good open source, a community of OS developers sprung up around it with Cyanogen.

The mobile phone industry has changed a lot since then. Nokia S60 operating system, Blackberry, Windows, and others have tried to compete and invested almost as much as an ICO windfall into the process. But it takes a lot more than dollars to put a wedge between the Android and iOS tug of war. I don't see Sirin Labs pulling off a fully independent hardware/software combo that will compete. But what bothers me most is my cynicism. I don't even believe they think they can do it, and feel like they've just added the 'blockchain' stamp to a popular product so that it gets a ticket on the blockchain bandwagon, so that they can ride it all the way to the blockchain gravy train.

Don't get me wrong, there is huge potential in blockchain technology, if you want an immutable distributed ledger that is excessively data heavy, slow to write to, and has redundancy duplicated at a thousand times any level that could possibly be justified. Just as a thought exercise, imagine if Twitter decided to decentralise its system using blockchain technology. There are about 500 million tweets sent per day, compared to about 200,000 bitcoin transactions per day. That's 2,500 times the number of transactions done in bitcoin over the same time period. I don't even know where to begin calculating the potential size of the twitter blockchain, but I know you'd never run a node from your mobile phone.

But this doesn't stop ICOs popping up that want to run a free, secure, private, instant messaging app on blockchain technology. And it is hard for me to feel like my messages are private when permanently stored on a public blockchain, where the leakage of a private key would mean my every message is there for all to read forever. So when I see what to me looks like an inappropriate application of blockchain technology pop up, it looks no different than some bold claim that they're going to reinvent Photoshop by building it on the blockchain. Or they're going to take on Youtube head to head by storing all video content on the blockchain. I can't imagine how these businesses can even pretend to believe what they are saying is true.

That's why I like what DNotes are doing. They're 'laser focused' on using blockchain for what it is best at. No fancy gimmicks or impossible claims. And their big bold plan is to create something that is more functional than many aspects of our global financial system, and benefits people in all of those societies that lack access to financial services. Sure, it is a huge undertaking, but it is both feasible and necessary.  

Sirin Labs Developing Blockchain Smartphone and PC

https://dcebrief.com/sirin-labs-developing-blockchain-smartphone-and-pc/

Great work on the GitHub. I've been browsing through all the files. I'm not a coder, but I can read code based on some limited C# courses I did at university when I studied Database Management Systems etc.

Also excellent to see Cryptostooges post about DNotes on Steemit. I liked how Cryptostooge differentiated the approach that DNotes is taking. Many things and trends go on in our industry - obsessions over anonymity, country coins, airdrops, scaling debates, pump and dumps, and now of course ICOs. DNotes by comparison just lets everybody do as they do, while focusing on our core central plan, which is to make using cryptocurrency as simple as possible and integrating it into the modern financial world. While these tech features make for excellent trading gains, and support very interesting and innovative advances in the space, it isn't as important how technologically amazing a currency is, or how complex its latest gimmicky feature is when you can't easily spend it, nor convert it into fiat (in lieu of full on crypto adoption).

Thank you very much, mrbum805. We are honored to have stakeholders like you.

We live in a very challenging world where many people are taken advantage of than being given an opportunity to get ahead. It is even more pronounced in our industry - very few promises are kept and misrepresentations are the norm.

Our commitment since day one is to be different and take a different path. Building a trusted brand has been among our top priorities. As an entrepreneur for over forty years my experience to help manage DNotes as a business, but not controlled as one, comes natural. I am proud to serve and looking forward to great success for DNotes so that many can get ahead.