This trend started with standalone blockchain projects – like Waves and Rise – with most or all of their coins pre-mined and offered for sale. Then we saw projects releasing tokens via smart-contracts on the Ethereum chain. Next came the projects created solely to offer a way for a company to manage an ICO. Some, like Ardor, even launched their ICO platforms with an ICO. At present we have over 600 tokens across a dozen chains, and while they aren’t all the result of an ICO, the majority are.

The Problems With ICOs

ICOs draw many similarities with Initial Public Offerings. They allow the public to fund a company as an investor and profit from the success of that company by selling their share or token at a profit in the future. The shares or tokens purchased can also be traded. That, however, is pretty much the extent of the similarities. The differences are where the problems lie.

Almost Anyone Can Create An ICO

Very few countries have regulated ICOs but IPOs are regulated in most of the world.

Here in Australia, the ASX requires that companies meet certain requirements to qualify for an IPO. The majority of ICOs that have occurred thus far would not be able to meet these constraints. In most cases their tokens were sold to fewer than 100 big whales with the smaller buyers getting less that the $2000.00 minimum required to be considered for the shareholder spread. Almost none of the companies behind these ICOs would qualify for the profit test nor would they have enough working capital to pass the asset test. They might, however, be able to meet Company Size criteria based on the projected sale of their tokens, if they can raise more that $15 million. This depends on when you take the measurement of the market cap, before or after the float.

For an ASX IPO, you need to be floating 20% of your company, and your company needs to have a market cap of $15 million or more. With a $15 million valuation, you are offering $3 million in shares. You have a product or functioning business that people are actually able to put a price on.

To meet these, or similar, criteria a company may have pre-ICO token sale. They announce the pre-sale and allow investors to register interest. Then they sell a small amount of tokens at reduced price to build a documented market valuation. This market valuation is fabricated though. It’s freshly established, and has no basis. It’s unlikely the company even has a minimally viable product (MVP) or a functioning business. They just have an idea, usually published in a PDF on a website – often labelled as a white paper.

You Don’t Own Any Part Of The Company

Once you have the token you bought, the link between you and that company is severed. You have no voting, shareholder, or stakeholders rights. They have no obligation to report to you on their progress or earnings. You didn’t buy part ownership of the company, you bought a token and they’ve given you the token. The company owners can now legally disappear with the funds you gave them.

You Have No Say In The Sale Price

As explained in this Forbes article, when company shares are sold in an IPO, the invest banks make requests for purchases. The company calculates and averages the price from the requests and settles on a price per share. The investment banks then execute their offers. Once the IPO is open, the investment banks then sell the shares on the market, where the public get to make bids and participate in the price discovery.

In an ICO, the company tells buyers how much the tokens cost and sells them privately. There is no open market and no price discovery. They decide they want $200 million, and so they sell 50 million tokens for $4 each, or 400 million tokens for 50 cents each.

You Have A Skewed Perception Of The Project

Early investors want a good return on their money, regardless of the investment. With IPOs there is little hype and lots of information available ahead of the IPO. With ICOs, it’s the exact oppsite.

The Build Up To The IPO

With an IPO, the return on investment (ROI) often comes many years after the IPO. For the average IPO Investor, they hear about the float a month or so ahead of time. They do their research in to the business – are people using the product, does it have potential for growth, and is it profitable. Then they reserve some funds to make the purchase, and when the IPO opens, they put in a bid.

The ICO Hype Train

The average ICO investor expects large ROI the moment the token hits an exchange. For them, they heard about the ICO a few months ahead of the pre-sale, and made sure they had some BTC or ETH ready to buy the tokens. They registered for the pre-sale as soon as it was possible. Because of the frenzy surrounding a lot of ICO pre-sales, there isn’t much time to research the company, the product or the market space. The investor reads the whitepaper and sinks money in to the pre-sale. Once the pre-sale has closed the wheels of the hype train need to start moving.

The investor opens Twitter, Discord, Slack, Reddit, 4Chan, Facebook, SteemIt, Medium, YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat and starts to post about this awesome new project they are looking in to. They shill this ICO with all their energy. By shill, I don’t mean someone who merely mentions a coin or token, as has become the accepted definition of the word. I mean they are making up features or promising profits, and they simply won’t stop talking about it. They refuse to accept any warnings or heed any advice. They’ve sunk money in to the project and they want their lambo.

Before long searching for the project returns only biased investor hype. More patient investors who wanted to research a project before buying now have to sift through mountains of shill droppings to get any solid information.

A month later, ICO opens and people start asking about the project. The early investors are there and waiting to answer their concerns with promises of fat profits. Stage one of the ICO closes, and these investors join the pre-sale investors on the hype train. More investors join in with the shilling of the project. The hype builds until the token is listen on an exchange. If the early investors have done a good job, they are able to offload their tokens above the purchase price before the market realises the hype is unfounded.

The Solution To The Problem

The easiest and quickest way to solve this issue before it ruins the digitial currency market place completely is to invite regulation of ICOs. These ICOs should be treated as either IPOs or venture capital investments. The token holders should be given voting rights in the companies. The tokens sold should not be the same as the ones that facilitate transactions within the project. This would be similar to what Sia did with SiaNotes/SiaFunds. It’s worked well and hasn’t generated much negative backlash for them – none that I have seen anyway.

The next option is to convince these money hungry start ups scrap the ICO altogether and form a company and seek funding via venture capital investments as usual – which is the path LBRY took – but that may be easier said than done. While this route is working well for LBRY, for every successful startup there are ten or more that failed. Most of these failures can be boiled down to it took longer to get the product to market than the funding allowed. This is why the allure of an ICO with massive amounts of money raised in a short time with little or no obligation to the investors is so great.

The post The ICO Threat appeared first on The Brazen Geek.

LBRY is a peer-to-peer network. With each user who consumes media through the app also hosting that media for others on the network. As with bit-torrent, users leech from the initial source, then seed the content to their peers. Rather than use .torrent files that need a centralised location to index and distribute them, LBRY distributes this metadata on the LBRY Blockchain, in a manner akin to magnet-links. Once you publish a piece of content, it will remain published and accessible forever. The content will also be available as long as someone, any one, is seeding it.

Why Does This Matter?

This prevents single point of failure censorship of content. A disgraced president can demand a video be removed from the LBRY network, but actually following that order is next to impossible. There is no mechanism for removing the video from the hard drives of the users who have already downloaded it. There is no mechanism for removing it from the previous blocks on the chain. The reference client, created by LBRY Inc and available at LBRY.io adheres to the official protocol specifications and removes abandoned claims for the available content.

But LBRY Inc says …

Yes, LBRY Inc says they are able to Combat the Ugly, or remove illegal or rights-infringing content. Censorship is possible through the official LBRY client. Content can be removed from the search results, or the claim itself could be blacklisted. Either way, this means typing in the address or searching for it won’t display it.

So How Is It Censorship Resistant?

The blacklisted claims still exist in the blockchain.  You can still access these blacklisted claims. Any developer could easily clone the LBRY App, and release their own version. It could use the same blockchain as the official app, but use it’s own search engine, and not have a blacklist. This means they would benefit from the security of the LBRY network’s hashrate and content library too.

So yes, the LBRY App is not 100% decentralised, but the part that is centralised is also easily removed or bypassed, and only exists to improve usability for non-tech-savvy users and to prevent the United States of MegaCorp from suing LBRY Inc. when Mr I-Dont-Care-About-Copyright uploads the latest Star Wars movie.

Other Thoughts

The LBRY name is an apt one. Like a regular library, the content with in it is best discovered by an index. You sit at a desk with a card catalog and search for an author, topic, or story theme, and it tells you where to find it. Like books, multiple content items can have the same name, and it’s the one that is most relevant that would show up first. You could simply browse the shelves until you find something you like as well.

And as with regular libraries, anyone can walk in, and place a book on the shelf, without the librarian knowing about it. It won’t be until they look there that they see it is out of place. Meanwhile, anyone else can come in and look at that book. If a book has been put on the list of forbidden books, all references to it can be removed from the card catalog. You won’t be able to search for it, even if it is still on the shelves, but that won’t stop you finding it if you know where to look.

The post LBRY Revisited appeared first on The Brazen Geek.

Reading the iPhone X announcement , I can already hear the Android fanboys chanting “But it’s not all screen…”

The iPhone X Is All Screen

Even so, in Apple’s defense, I think it is all screen. The screen goes beyond just the pixel matrix; it includes the bezel etc. It’s just not all display, and that’s fine. Even sensible Android users will tell you of the perils of using full width displays on the phones like Samsung did.

Even so, Apple have pulled off a master stroke of design and engineering with the iPhone X.  This release will have a large impact on smartphones in the next few years. Looking at the LG G6 beside my keyboard I notice of how much influence Apple has over smartphone aesthetics.

A New Hope

I feel something I haven’t felt since Android added NFC and wireless charging. Hope. I look forward to the next few years of hardware innovation-pong between Apple and the Android OEMs.

The post Apple Breathes New Life Into iPhone Range appeared first on The Brazen Geek.

Which of these two projects with extremely similar logos was the first to establish their brand under their current logo? As both projects get more attention, this question is getting asked more often. Actually, people often ask the question as Did LBRY copy Stratis? LOL!

The answer to that one is no. LBRY was using their logo long before Stratis swapped to their current logo.

Oh! You want some proof of that claim? But I thought this was the Internet?! Okay…

The LBRY Timeline

A quick look at the LBRY Git respositories shows the first time their logo is recorded in one of their projects – in this case, their public website. That file was committed to their repository on the October 9, 2015. They may have had the logo before that, but that’s the earliest I have been able to find it online at present.

The LBRY timeline is really easy to establish – the project doesn’t hide things from the public.

The Stratis Timeline

Stratis seems to have under gone a few change of plan upheavals in it’s short life time. This made establishing a timeline for their branding a little harder.

I set about looking through the various Stratis Git repositories for any  reference to the Stratis logo, and the earliest reference to the current logo I was able to find is a commit on the December 28, 2016.

Surely if they were available for trading around the same time LBRY (July 6th, 2016) was, they would have had a logo on the exchanges.

Well they did. But prior to 2017, it was a different one: The Internet Archive’s Wayback machine shows that from June 18, 2016 (and possibly earier) to November 28, 2016 (and possibly longer).

The Stratis Whitepaper, published on June 14th, 2016 also shows the old logo.

The Ruling

LBRY was using their current logo before Stratis created a logo of great similarity for their project. The time-stamped evidence speaks for itself.

Update:

Since posting this article, I have been provided with information that suggests the original logo used by Stratis was a copy of Google’s Fabric logo (at the time, it could have been Twitter’s Fabric Logo). This blog post shows Fabric using the icon prior to Stratis.

The post LBRY and Stratis – Battle of the Logos appeared first on The Brazen Geek.

Exchanges

There are two types of cryptocurrency exchange – those that allow you to buy currencies with fiat money and those that only allow trading from one cryptocurrency to another.

Generally,  exchanges that allow trading of fiat against cryptocurrencies limit the cryptocurrencies they support. For example, CEX.io only allows you to use USD, GBP, EUR, and RUB (and other currencies, converted by your credit card company) to buy ETH and BTC. Meanwhile the other exchanges have many more cryptocurrencies available for trading – Bittrex and Poloniex have a few hundred altcoins each.

Buying and Selling

The easiest way to trade cryptocurrencies is to buy and sell the coins you think will generate gains. Different exchanges handle this differently, some allowing you to create stop-limit orders, others only allowing you to enter the limit order directly.

If you are buying and selling any more than a few hundred dollars it would be wise to set up a personal wallet. The last thing you want is to have made $20,000 profit this year, only to have the exchange get hacked or close and you lose everything . Remember, unless you control the keys that hold the cryptocurrency, the coins aren’t yours.  I will be making recommendations on wallets and coins to consider trading in future posts.

Margin Trading

Margin trading is another way of making profits off cryptocurrencies. It can be much more lucrative than regular trading, but also carries additional risks.

Margin trading is effectively using your own coin has collateral in order to borrow more to purchase another – Poloniex has a really good explanation of this on their FAQ.

Unfortunately, margin trading requires that you keep your holdings on the exchange as collateral. This is one of those additional risks – you’re trusting the exchange with your finances.

Lending

The final way of making a profit from your holdings is lending it to others who wish to margin trade. The profits you make will be smaller this way – only making interest on the coin you lend. As the collateral of the borrower, covers the losses, the risk is completely eliminated. Again, Poloniex’s FAQ has a good explanation of exactly how this works.

The post Intro to Crypto – Exchanges appeared first on The Brazen Geek.

The Good Ridiculous

Apple has made a few too many hyperbolic announcements at WWDC:

• A “revolutionary new 10.5 inch iPad Pro” that has the same screen size (but lower resolution) as my 2-year-old Android Tablet.
• An amazing new feature on the iPhone and iPad (that has been available on Android since day one, and Windows PPC/Mobile/Phone since at least 2003) – user access to the file system. Oh wait. No, it’s just a single app that collates all your files in one place.
• A “magic keyboard” that finally gives you the numpad back – why did they remove it in the first place?
• The HomePod which will “reinvent music” … in the same way the Amazon Echo, Amazon Dot, Google Chromecast Audio, and Google Home did years ago.
• The all new Apple Watch, that still looks as ugly as the first generation of Apple Watch… Seriously, they couldn’t make it round, or thinner or something?

The Bad Decent

Apple also announced a new App store. Google tends to update their App store without much fan-fare (and let’s be honest, manages to anger their users by doing so). Apple, however, feels the need to let everyone know that the store that usually only gets incremental improvements will be getting some major attention this time round.

The Ugly Amazing

Before you begin to think that Apple is incapable of doing anything new, let me say they made some awesome announcements too:

•  iMac Pro:
  • 4GHz CPU with 18 cores
  • Vega graphics on a 5K screen
  • up to 128GB of RAM
  • up to 4TB of SSD storage

  Shame there is no VESA mounting plate for these things.

• High Sierra: a stupid name for what is an excellent improvement on macOS. Because it keeps the Sierra name it sounds like it’s the previous operating system, with some extra polish. This isn’t the case. There is a whole new filesystem, improved graphics engine, and tighter integration with iCloud. This new release deserved more fan-fare and a better release name: Rocky.

The post Worldwide Developers Conference 2017 appeared first on The Brazen Geek.

Origins of PIVX

PIVX , known as DarkNet before a professional re-brand, is a fork of DASH (which also re-branded from DarkCoin). It aims to addresses the centralization and instamine concerns surrounding DASH.

While PIVX was premined to get the ecosystem started independently and without an ICO, the PIVX Development team publicly destroyed those premined coins.

Decentralized Governance

The thing that drew me to PIVX was the Proof of Stake consensus. Combined with reward balancing between the staking and master nodes, PoS offsets the centralization of master nodes with the decentralization of staking nodes.

PoS also avoids the control conflict that Bitcoin is struggling with at the moment because it doesn’t use Proof of Work. Anyone can create a Staking Node without specialist hardware. All that is needed is sufficient PIVX to stake a claim and a constant connection to the network. This results in more individuals running nodes, rather than a few big pools deciding the consensus rules of their miners. Furthermore, the PoS model makes the coin itself more valuable, as less coins are in active circulation.

Features for the Future

While these benefits are compelling, there is much more on the roadmap that will make it a solid investment. It may even be the cryptocurrency that finally makes it to mainstream acceptance.

Key among the planned features are privacy, scaling and governance:

• Swapping to private-by-default transactions by using the ZeroCoin protocol for all transactions;
• Elastic block size, similar to Monero’s solution;
• Masternode voting on fund allocation, protocol changes, and the future of the project as a whole;

As PIVX grows and steps out of the shadow of DASH it will gain momentum. We will see other systems integrating this currency rapidly: Ledger and Trezor support, more exchanges offering trading, and more independent projects built around this new currency.

For more information, checkout the official website

The post PIVX – The New Kid On The Block appeared first on The Brazen Geek.

The Technology

Each cryptocurrency is different (with the exclusion of the straight up clones, or the forks that refused to die).

We have first generation cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin was designed purely for value transactions – a way to replace exchanging money. Litecoin is almost the same as Bitcoin, but offers a different algorithm, while Monero adds in enforced anonymity.

Then there are the second generation cryptocurrencies – ones that power platforms. Ethereum was  built as a platform for smart contracts to be developed in Solidity. Lisk expanded upon that, allowing them to be written in Javascript. Rise went even further and made smart contracts available in almost any programming language.

Next we have the MemeCoins – TrumpCoin, Clinton, DogeCoin,  EtherDoge and more. These are pretty much first or second generation cryptocurrencies, but have just been cloned and renamed to suit a joke someone wanted to make.

And most recently we have a third generation – application based chains. Sia, MaidSafe and Storj were built to allow data to be stored and retrieved securely. LBRY was developed with the goal of an internet-wide, distributed content-sharing network.

There are hundreds of other coins (more than 700 so far) out there too, and each one has something that sets them apart – be it the technology, ideology, or end goal. One thing they all seem to have in common though, is blockchain technology.

Blockchain

At it’s core, blockchain technology is simple – a data storage system that is managed by hundreds of thousands of computers all around the world all processing the data and sharing it between them. No one computer has the last say on the data, and any data added must be validated a certain number of times before it is accepted as valid.

Data is sent to connected nodes, they prioritize it in a queue for processing, it gets checked to be valid, then added to a block, that block is then added to the chain and sent to other nodes, they validate it and its data.

There are a lot of process involved in validating the data – cryptography comes in to it’s own here. Hashes of the transactions, the data, everything, are generated and compared to previous transactions. This is done to prevent fraudulent transactions (double-spends) being forged by malicious nodes.

This whole process of validating the data is done very quickly. Each node is racing against the others to solve all these mathematical and cryptographic “puzzles” to be the first to form a block.

Once a block has been formed by that first node, it is officially part of the blockchain. If two or more blocks are created for the same spot on the chain at the same time, the first node to have their block validated by others gets their block accepted, and the other blocks are orphaned. Blocks are also orphaned if the other nodes refuse to validate the transactions within it – the most common reason for this is incompatible node software, but it could also be because the block contains a forged transaction that doesn’t validate correctly.

That’s the best I can do to simplify the blockchain technology, but I suggest you read a more thorough explanation than that though.

Mining

As blocks get added to the chain and validated by other nodes, the nodes that create the blocks are rewarded for their validation work. In addition to the transaction fees paid by the people sending the data, these nodes are often paid a reward for the effort of validating the transactions on the network. These rewards are called a mining reward.  There are a number of ways these rewards are decided – Proof of Work and Proof of Stake being the two most common. I won’t go in to them here, but the links for each should give you an understanding of how they differ.

Transactions

Transactions, in the context of this article isn’t limited to moving money from sender to recipient . And while cryptocurrencies are used for that, the transactions on the blockchain are really just data being sent and received. When I pay for my morning croissant and orange juice with Bitcoin, I am not actually transferring ฿0.0132. What I am sending is the data that increases the recipient’s wallet balance by ฿0.0132, and reduces the balance of my wallet by the same amount, plus transaction fees. That data is publicly available and verifiable, and can be checked and validated against the encryption keys I use to create the transaction. These keys are generated when I create my wallet.

Wallets

In cryptocurrency, the way your “coins” are stored is more in keeping with a wallet than a bank account. There are a several properties wallets  have, listed in detail below. These properties can be combined with others in a multitude of ways, each with their own pros and cons. One thing all wallets have in common is the ability to generate recipient addresses for transactions, and sign transactions to send data.

Online/Air-gapped

Online and air-gapped wallets refers to the method that the keys were generated.

Online generation is done with a computer that has (or has previously had) an network connect. This is okay, but if your computer has any malware – virus, worm, trojan or spyware – it shouldn’t be trusted.

Online wallets could also be a SaaS – MyEtherWallet and MyMonereo are two sites that offer wallets as a service – they are client side websites served to your browser that can interact with their blockchain through the website’s nodes.

Air-gapped wallets generate keys on a device that hasn’t had an network connection. This could be a computer that had the wallet software transferred via a USB drive, or a smart phone that had the software side-loaded on to it via an SD card or similar.

Additionally, you can generate a key yourself, with a pen and paper, if you’re a total math wiz. It’s not easy, and could take a long time though.

Software/Hardware

Software wallets are wallets you can download and install on any computer. Electrum, Mycelium, Breadwallet, Jaxx, Mist, etc. These are the wallets most of us use every day. They are fine for every day use, but they are not without their security faults. There are more and more types of malware that are targeting crypto wallets. These viruses allow attackers to steal you private keys in the same way they steal your banking details. Unless you can be 100% sure that your computer is virus free, a software wallet is only okay for hot storage of currency.

Hardware wallets are little gadgets like Trezor, Nano Ledger, and Jaxx’s Ice Cube. They allow you to store your private keys on purpose built hardware. This hardware is closed and secure and relies on software wallets to send the signed transactions to the blockchain nodes. Hardware wallets are much more secure than software wallets – your keys are kept safely on the hardware gadget.

Hot/Cold

Hot wallets are like your everyday wallet, the one you keep in your jeans’ pockets and use every day. It could easily be stolen because it is out and active all the time.

Hot Wallet examples:

• Mycelium running on your everyday smartphone
• Electrum on your desktop computer

Cold wallets are like your backup wallet, the one you keep in the shoe box under the bed and never use. This one is harder to steal, the thief would need physical access to the wallet.

Cold Wallet examples:

• Mycelium running on a smartphone that has had the battery removed, and is locked in the top draw of your office desk
• A Trezor locked in a safety deposit box in a Swiss Bank
• A key, printed out on paper as a QR code and laminated, then stored in the cover of the third book from the left, on the fourth shelf down, in your lounge room bookshelf

Single/HD/Multi Signature

Single signature wallets are simple wallets that only need a single key to create a signature for a transaction. This means there is just one key protecting you coins.

HD wallets are a type of single key wallets that use a string of words to generate multiple single key addresses, and move your coins to new keys with every transaction. HD wallets protect your coins better than single signature wallets without the complexity of multiple keys.

Multisignature wallets need more than one. Say you have a 2-3 multisig wallet. That means the wallet has three keys, and needs two of them to be used to transfer data. This works well for businesses and superannuation funds, so no one person can do anything without the help of someone else.

Additionally, multisignature wallets are infinitely more safe than a single wallet. It would require someone cracking 2 out of 3 keys to access your wallet. Cracking a single Bitcoin key would take more than one trillion centuries, and the odds of cracking two are exponential.

Full/Lite

Full nodes are applications that have fully synchronized the entire blockchain, and while it isn’t mining itself, it can broadcast the transaction to other nodes itself.

Lite wallets connect to full nodes, and store handle the transactions for the addresses in the wallet it holds.

Combinations

Copay is an online, software, lite, multi-sig capable, hot wallet that is available on every platform. It can be used to create air-gapped cold storage wallets too.

Mycelium is an online, software, lite, HD hot wallet that is available on Android and iOS. It too can be used for cold storage, and it can sign transactions from hardware wallets.

Bitcoin Unlimited is an online, software, full node, HD hot wallet that is available for all desktop platforms. It can also be used for mining and to support the network.

My personal preference is Mycelium for my Bitcoin, Jaxx for my Ethereum, SimpleWallet for Monero, and the LBRY client for my LBRY credits. (Even though Jaxx supports Bitcoin, I wanted to keep it separate from my Ether to prevent any confusion with the addresses)

Creating a transaction from your wallet is simple. All you do is enter the address you want to transfer to, and the amount to transfer, and press send.

Each cryptocurrency has a different address format. These addresses are unique to that currency – you can’t send Ether to a Bitcoin address for example.

Be careful when picking a wallet. I have put more research in to my wallets than I did choosing my major at university. You need to make sure it was developed openly and has been through community audits.

Make sure the wallet you use gives you control of the private keys.

If you don’t control the keys, you don’t own the coins. If you don’t have a backup of those keys, you risk losing the coins.

Always ask community members if you have any concerns about the wallets available – either on Slack or Reddit. As a last resort, you could also ask on BitcoinTalk.org but remember, that place is full of trolls and ogres.

Well, that’s it for part two in this series. I am busy writing  part three and hope to have it published in a week or two.

The post Intro to Crypto – The Tech appeared first on The Brazen Geek.

What Is A Cryptocurrency?

The dictionary definition, according to Google, states a digital currency in which encryption techniques are used to regulate the generation of units of currency and verify the transfer of funds, operating independently of a central bank.

That’s a pretty decent place to start. The problem with that definition is that some it doesn’t mention anything about the decentralized nature of the technology. Additionally, central banks have started looking into cryptocurrencies now, and the central banks aren’t the only big names that are interested.

Who Uses Cryptocurrencies?

Everyone.  Businesses, governments, banks, mega-corps, grandparents, software developers, investors, and of course, criminals. Don’t let that last one put you off crypto though. criminals also breathe air, drink water, use the internet, drive cars, and spend money. If you want to avoid anything used by criminals, you won’t live longer. Really though, cryptocurrencies seem to have an appeal to every demographic, regardless of race, religion, colour or creed.

In more specific terms though here are a few of the big names investing into the technology that supports cryptocurrencies:

Goldman Sachs, Australia Post, the Bank of England, the United States Postal Service, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, ANZ, Cisco, Wells-Fargo, IBM, Richard Branson, Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, AXA, Nasdaq

Why Cryptocurrencies Matter

There are some who believe we need cryptocurrencies  because the governments are owned and run by the central banks. For an example, watch the video below.

Ignoring the extremist, tin-foil hat conspiracies, and focusing on the facts of the video, you get to the crux of why cryptocurrencies matter. The companies I mentioned above are investing in to cryptocurrencies because they want in on what will become the future of finance. It may not happen in my life-time, or The Geekling’s but it will happen. Bank issued money (fiat) will fail. We will either swap back to a gold based monetary system, or adopt a technology based system. Why? Because fiat favours the rich.

If you and I, those without inherited wealth, decide to stop using fiat, and move our wealth to a system that can’t be tracked, taxed, controlled, or manipulated, the rich lose.

Right now, I have an undisclosed amount of wealth in cryptocurrencies. I can use that to buy goods or pay for services. I can transfer it to friends and family. If I do it correctly without exposing any details about myself, I won’t be identified. There would be no way to tie that wealth to me, yet I would be in full control of it. How can you tax something without knowing who owes taxes? How can you control something when every person in the world has the potential to influence the system? You can’t. And that is why cryptocurrency matters. It puts the people back in control of their finances.

Well, that’s it for part one in this series. I have written part two and scheduled it for publication early next week.

The post Intro to Crypto – The Basics appeared first on The Brazen Geek.

Unleash the Kraken

I installed GitKraken on Windows, and launched it for the first time. The on-boarding process the developers have created is wonderful. Each page of settings is explained to me through tool-tips. I set up Github and Bitbucket integration, and loaded my SSH keys for my private servers. Set up was a breeze. I cloned a repository to from Bitbucket to my wwwroot folder. Perfect. I made a few changes, staged the changes, then committed them in with a nice message. Finally, I made some changes on a different machine, and pushed those changes, and then pulled from my Bitbucket in GitKraken. Now, these changes I made were deliberately difficult. Something that would need a manual merge, and would frustrate me normally, doing it from the command-line.

GitKraken started the pull, and launched Beyond Compare for me to manually merge the files, and then carried on. It was a dream.

New Interface, Same Workflow

Unlike most of the Git GUIs I have tried in the past, GitKraken isn’t tied to the file explorer or an IDE. It is it’s own stand alone application. This means updates don’t need a reboot like the Tortoise tools do.

GitKraken is also a single place for all your Git repositories. This may take some getting used to, but it does make for a less cluttered taskbar. Rather than interact with multiple dialogs in half a dozen windows, you use one window for all your repositories, and swap between them easily. It even located some repositories I had in folders on my desktop for me!

This  means the workflow I use on my desktop/laptop is now the same as the one I use on the go with my tablet. That helps keep my headspace a little less crowded.

It’s amazing how this software has managed to keep all the power of the command line, without becoming overly complex. You can browse local and remote branches, and view stashed changes. You can merge, pull, push, revert, rebase – everything you expect from a Git client. And doing it through the GitKraken GUI is just so much easier.

The only let down I have experienced is one that should be easy to overcome – the built in SSH agent doesn’t allow for unlocking SSH keys protected with a passphrase. I’ll have to create a single copy of my private key that doesn’t have a passphrase, just for git access now – it’s not ideal, but nor is it a deal breaker (and it’s probably only an issue on Windows, when you aren’t using a dedicated SSH agent).

Time To GitKraken

(Get cracking) … Yeah, I laughed too. Anyway, head over to the developer’s site , download it for your chosen OS – it works on Mac and Linux as well as Windows – and give it a shot. The dev team over at Axosoft have just released a pro version that adds user profiles – work + personal repositories can now be separated, but managed under the one account. It also handles merge conflicts internally – no need for Beyond Compare!

Axosoft have generously given The Brazen Geek a 1 month promo code for Pro access to share with our readers.

GitKraken Pro Promo Code: GKPREV6

Now you have absolutely no excuse not to try it out!

The post GitKraken – Finally, A Git GUI That Doesn’t Suck appeared first on The Brazen Geek.