Square Cash Has A Beautiful Landing Page But Fails To Provide Real Bitcoin Services

Square Cash Has A Beautiful Landing Page But Fails To Provide Real Bitcoin Services

Square Cash, also known as “Cash” or Square, Inc. has recently added Bitcoin investing to their list of services.  Square Cash allows users to transfer money using a phone app. The platform now boasts over 7 million users, as of 2018.

Why Square Cash Fails To Provide Real Bitcoin Services

With their new found interest in Bitcoin and blockchain technology, Square, Inc. is now allowing users to purchase and hold Bitcoin in their app. The catch is, they hold the blockchain asset, not you. We explored their new service offering and were completely let down. It turns out you can’t send or receive Bitcoin from the Square app. There are no bitcoin addresses to be seen. Bitcoin and blockchain are all about transparency and the Square Cash app gives users the opposite. They tell you that you now hold Bitcoin in the app but how do you know? You simply can’t verify the information. We doubt they are lying about any of the info displayed, but how would you know otherwise?

If Square Cash wants acceptance from Bitcoin investors, they will have to update their app and make it more transparent. There needs to be proof of purchase on the Bitcoin blockchain. Verifiability is paramount in the blockchain space.

What we liked was their beautiful landing page and informative information about Bitcoin and it’s anonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.

Check out some screenshots from https://cash.me/bitcoin :

 

New US Congress Report Praises Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Technology

New US Congress Report Praises Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Technology

The report is generally positive on the matter of cryptocurrency, which is surprising. They want “policymakers” to be more educated about blockchain and its potential.

It seems the US government is warming up to crypto and accepting the fact that blockchains are not going away.

Excerpts From The Cryptocurrency Report:

Blockchain Looks Like the New Internet

“The buzz surrounding digital currencies resembles the internet excitement in the late 1990s when people recognized technology companies could change the world. Many internet companies launched and their valuations took off in short order. Many failed, but a few succeeded spectacularly and challenged the conventional ways of doing business.”

 

Cryptocurrencies Could Outshine Government Fiat

“Some critics of currencies controlled by government fiat welcome cryptocurrencies because their supply is preprogrammed and perceived as unchangeable. For example, only 21 million bitcoins will ever be issued and the last fraction of a bitcoin will be issued in approximately 2140. Additionally, the creator of Ethereum designed its mining reward to decline exponentially as more miners create blocks, and according to his calculations the supply will be just over 100 million ether.”

 

Blockchain Is Secure and Efficient

“Cryptocurrencies and ICOs create headlines, and the pace of financial innovation in the blockchain space amazes skeptics. Yet, with all the headlines focusing on the financial applications, people may miss the digital revolution now happening with other blockchain applications. Even worse, people could be frightened about new developments with the technology as they associate blockchains with the negative headlines. Blockchain technology offers a decentralized, secure, and efficient way to store almost any form of data across multiple platforms.”

 

The Conclusion

“Technology presents evolving challenges and generates new solutions. Blockchain technology essentially stores and transmits data securely, in large volume, and at high speeds. So far, the technology has proved largely resistant to hacking, and given this feature, developers first applied it to digital currencies. Yet blockchain has many more potential applications, such as portable medical records and securing the critical financial and energy infrastructure that the Report identified.”

Source

John Oliver Covers Bitcoin And Cryptocurrencies On Last Week Tonight

John Oliver Covers Bitcoin And Cryptocurrencies On Last Week Tonight

John Oliver is an English comedian, writer, producer, political commentator, actor and television host. He is most known for is work on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and now he is making a name for himself on his very own show on HBO called Last Week Tonight.

Quite recently he released an entire episode covering Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

Oliver does a great job aggregating information to explain Bitcoin:

“I’m a virtual currency, worldwide, that you can send for little to no fees, open source, not controlled by any government, corporation or individual. It’s financial freedom BRO!”

He even brought on Don Tapscott, author of Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World, who spoke on the security of blockchain technology:

“A blockchain is a very highly processed thing like a chicken mcnugget and if you wanted to hack it it would be like turning a chicken mcnugget back into a chicken. Now someday someone will be able to do that but for now it’s going to be tough.”

We commend John Oliver for covering Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, which we believe are the future of finance and data recording.

For much of the episode Oliver focuses on responsibility when investing in cryptocurrencies telling viewers to not invest any more than they could afford to lose, which is a pretty standard phrase in any financial market. But still good advice.

John Oliver also hones in on the EOS project, which he clearly does not understand. He reads off the initial coin offering numbers scoffing at how much value the EOS team has raised. Oliver also doesn’t understand Block.one’s obscure mission statement and relationship to the EOS blockchain. Launching a cryptocurrency that competes against state created fiat currencies is highly illegal according to governments. Block.one does not want to be held directly responsible for the launch of the decentralized network. If governments could find out who Satoshi Nakamoto is, you had better believe they would kill him.

Watch the episode below:

Dear John Oliver – By eosio On Medium

Block.one’s CTO Daniel Larimer has previously built and deployed two of the most used (and “usable”) decentralized applications to date. Having originally worked on the development of Bitcoin and feeling it would not adequately perform, Dan developed a scalable high performance Blockchain architecture, now widely known as Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS); today DPOS processes the majority of all blockchain transactions globally.

EOSIO is designed to leverage DPOS and familiar scripting languages to enable developers and businesses to more easily take advantage of high performance blockchain capabilities, and deploy open source community driven business models.

Block.one believes Blockchain technologies have the potential to become the next mainstream infrastructure for communication and commerce, and can introduce new freedoms while streamlining compliance and universal interoperability. The company is committed to the technological and regulatory innovation required to push forward on common ground for developers, users, businesses, and regulatory agencies around the world.

Block.one and community contributors make continual progress on the development of the EOSIO platform that can be viewed on the EOSIO Github, a fully transparent hub where the real time progress of feature creation through to completion can be viewed and contributed to.

They then discussed Brock Pierce, who is now moving on to independent community building and investment activities. In short the Block.one crew has no hard feelings and is thankful for his contributions.

They went on to say:

As a growing company building value through an open source community as opposed to traditional avenues of proprietary software ownership, we are conscious of the importance of robust corporate communications. We take professional standards seriously and are always focused on raising the bar as our company transitions from startup to aggressive growth. We value acknowledgment of room for continued improvement and remain confident in our mission to further the impact of Blockchain as a foundational technology.

Thanks again for the entertaining reminder to stay informed when it comes to new industries, concepts, and people.

Your fans at Block.one

P.S. If you’re interested in blockchain based Beanie Babies, we recommend exploring #Cryptokitties

Busy.org Takes The Steemit User Interface To The Next Level

Busy.org Takes The Steemit User Interface To The Next Level

Busy.org is one of the best ways to post on the STEEM blockchain. The open-source project is an alternative Steemit user interface. Steemit.com is the most well known website or block explorer and is just one way to interact with the STEEM blockchain.  Front-end interfaces allow users to see notifications for mentions, new followers, comments, and upvotes.

Other STEEM block explorers and apps: ESteem.ws (designed for mobile), D.Tube, DSound, Zappl, and DMania.lol

Awesome Features On Busy.org – The Best Steemit User Interface

The STEEM price is featured on the side in a very clean interface. Vote power and upvote worth are also seen on the account homepage. Posting is made easy with their built in editor, wherein you can save multiple draft posts. Users can get a free upvote from the Busy account for using the busy tag.

Busy created its own page to monitor your activity, you can easily filter by criteria that you specify. You can also easily search through your historical activity

Whenever a post is about a specific cryptocurrency, Busy.org will recognize the crypto name of the coin and list the current price to the left of the page.

Busy now has a referral program. You can find your shareable link in the settings on Busy. You can share it to receive a 10% of post rewards for 1 month from the new Steemians who you bring on.

 

 

More About Busy:

At Busy.org, “we believe in wisdom of the crowd, open decision-making, taking a collaborative and transparent approach, that’s why all our work is open source. Everyone is free to contribute, by all appropriate means to accomplish our mission. Not only coders but also designers, writers, translators, testers, marketers, advisors, etc. We’re partnering with @utopian.io to incentivize and reward open source contributions on Busy.org.” (Check on Utopian)

Source: @busy

New STEEM App, DMania To Compete Against 9GAG And Other Meme Sites.

New STEEM App, DMania To Compete Against 9GAG And Other Meme Sites.

DMania is one of the newest apps on the STEEM blockchain. The project aims to build a website to compete against 9GAG and other internet meme sites.

9GAG is popular online platform and social media website for collections of Internet memes. It was launched back in 2008.

As of November 2017 the meme site had over 223 million visitors with the following breakdown: 11.03% from Germany, 5.55% from the United States, 4.40% from France, 4.19% from Brazil and 3.99% from United Kingdom – Wikipedia

There are heated debates on Steemit right now about DMania being a positive or negative for STEEM. Is DMania for plagiarism and stealing others original work or creativity or harmlessly sharing images and data online?

Are jokes worth money? The comedians who make a living making people laugh would say yes.

We Think DMania is a cool and interesting project in the Steemit blockchain ecosystem. We shall see if it gains traction and attracts high volume of website traffic. 9GAG certainly does.

dMania – Create Funny Memes And Earn Steem

Other STEEM Apps Worth Checking Out

D.Tube is the first crypto-decentralized video platform, built on top of the STEEM Blockchain and the IPFS peer-to-peer network.  D.Tube is a great alternative to YouTube for content creators and they get paid in STEEM!

Because of the decentralized nature of IPFS and the STEEM blockchain, D.Tube is not able to censor videos only users censor through the power of upvotes and downvotes.

D.Tube runs without advertising, giving a better user experience. D.Tube also uses IPFS peer-to-peer networks. IPFS is a protocol that enables decentralized file storage.

 

Busy.org is one of the coolest apps for STEEM blockchain. We highly suggest it. The latest release allows for DTube videos to embed in posts on Busy.

Busy.org is an open-source social network and communications platform that includes a variety of rich features and functionalities.

An open platform for an apps ecosystem: Busy’s goal is to build an all-in-one platform and allow many apps and features to flourish on top of the Busy social media platform. We are offering an open-source and secure social network layer to bootstrap any Apps (like Facebook Apps does, or WeChat services), games, community tools, marketplaces for good or services, using Steem.js API, SteemConnect and the Busy.org ‘framework.’

An open-source project and vision, and an alternative interface to Steemit.com: we believe in wisdom of the crowd, open decision-making, taking a collaborative and transparent approach, that’s why all our work is open source. Everyone is free to contribute, by all appropriate means to accomplish our mission. Not only coders but also designers, writers, translators, testers, marketers, advisors, etc. We’re partnering with @utopian.io to incentivize and reward open source contributions on Busy.org. (Check on Utopian)

 

Steepshot is an open source Web app for lifestyle sharing based on Steem blockchain. It’s similar to Instagram, but you post on the STEEM blockchain. Check out their Steemit Page or visit steepshot.io

Music Producer Launches His Own Blockchain Token

Music Producer Launches His Own Blockchain Token

Tech companies aren’t the only one launching blockchain tokens these days. Music artists are now utilizing blockchain tech to protect their work and earn revenue without labels and banks.

According to Wikipedia Gramatik AKA Denis Jašarević, is a Slovenian electronic music producer, originally from Portorož, Slovenia. He currently resides in New York City making genre-fusing electronic music.

On November 10, 2017, Gramatik launched his own blockchain token called GRMTK. He released 25 million GRMTK ERC20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.

Gramatik – ” I waited for the release of a platform like SingularDTV that uses Blockchain technology to pass me intermediates. I just want to get my music out when I want and on my own terms. I want to get rid of all this bureaucracy. I just want to make music. In a world that belongs to banks and businesses, Blockchain technology is pretty much the only thing that gives me hope for the future. ” source

 

 

Gramatik – Satoshi Nakamoto MUSIC VIDEO (feat. Adrian Lau & ProbCause)

Follow Gramatik:
YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/user/Gramatikk
Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/gramatik/
Soundcloud : https://soundcloud.com/gramatik

Want to launch your own blockchain token?

There are several ways and several blockchains you could consider for launching blockchain tokens and initial coin offerings. If you ask us, we say wait till the EOS launches this summer and build it on that blockchain platform.

Ethereum is another popular blockchain platform for tokenization. There are currently over 510 ERC20 tokens on Ethereum.

STEEM is also coming out with SMART MEDIA TOKENS for content platforms to tokenize with a stake weighted voting system like Steemit has.

Smart Media Tokens

You could also check out Token Magic for comprehensive white glove service for end-to-end token sale solutions with proven success.