One of those hope tomorrow is a better day

One of those days where not a lot of real news , but a lot of losses.   Maybe tomorrow will be a better day.   But I'm not sure most altcoins or even Ethereum will last.  

    Most won't go to zero, but as everybody loves to Proclaim "remember the early internet in 1995" memes almost all of those internet companies didn't last.   Microsoft and Apple were not internet. Apple was practically bankrupt back then too and irrelevant. And kind of missed out early on and Microsoft was soon broken up.
 
Google came later and stole the thunder from the Yahoo's and altavista's and so on.   Netscape and Prodigy and CompuServe disappeared.   AOL and their free 3.5 inch disks became irrelevant.   Even Amazon wasn't really internet.  They were an online book store that sold cheap books. 

   So taken with a grain of salt things like Ethereum and Litecoin and others are great early adopters to push things forward and the Vitalik's and Lee' and many others may go on to form various startups, but most of the early companies disappear. I think a lot of the hodlrs who dream of 100 bucks becoming a million  will be depressed in a few years.  

And blockchain and decentralized have many advantages, but most tokens are pointless.   And two thousand tokens are definitely a mostly pointless endever.    But maybe a cardano will eventually have a "real" platform. Or not.   Or a fixed Iota for autonomous cars.    Or a Square token payment system. Or QTUM or something we don't even know about yet. Or real quantum computing will change everything. 

Time will tell, but an interesting space to be in.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/crypto-markets-see-sharp-decline-as-total-market-cap-drops-12-billion-in-one-hour

BITCOIN HASHRATE HITS NEW RECORD WITH 50% GAIN IN AUGUST

Bitcoin hashrate records record gains in August 2018.  Good stuff. 

Evo con .... seriously

I get the need for startups to hire interns and pay lower wages.  I even get the need for them to delay payments. But blockchain has created some serious scams and brought out the con artists galore.  Or worse these people are just plain terrible to even think of working for ....

I mean what incentives would someone with real contacts and experience have here ?  They basically are doing what the founders should be doing.  Evochain scam. Seriously. 

Here is the post ....

------++++++;;;;;;;;;

Professional Fundraiser

EvoChain

Silicon Valley, CA

$90,000 - $160,000 a year

Commission

We are a private blockchain startup . We are looking to raise seed capital for our startup. We are in need of experienced fundraisers. The position starts out as commissions only, and works it self into a position of salary after you've proven your ability to secure investments. We are a rising company and are looking to hire immediately. Your job will be to fund raise a significant amount for our Company.

**Experience/education and investor contacts are a must.**

Contact us today and please provide your resume with cover letter.

This position REQUIRES a FINRA Series 7 securities license and US citizenship or authorization to work in the United States. This is a remote position that requires you to secure private placement investment into EvoChain Inc., for which you will be compensated a commission.

Job Type: Commission

Salary: $90,000.00 to $160,000.00 /year

Experience:

fundraising: 5 years (Preferred)

License:

FINRA Series 7 (Required)

Work authorization:

United States (Required)

---------

Amazon doesnt pay its bills

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-20/amazon-isn-t-paying-its-electric-bills-you-might-be

QTUM hackathon

https://hackathon.qtum.org/en

Pagarba will be participating in the QTUM  hackathon challenge building  payments, smart Contracts, DAPP , etc. 

Cardano testnet smart contracts

https://iohk.io/blog/cardano-smart-contracts-testnet-iele-launches/

Proof of ...what ?

Good breakdown between proof of work and proof of stake consensus.

https://medium.com/@jaybny/on-proof-of-skill-6af149f45ce8

Trustless blockchain or not ...

https://www.ccn.com/microsofts-new-ethereum-blockchain-product-gets-rid-of-mining/

I understand the use case and philosophy behind this, but similar to IBMs hyperledger fabric and others , what's the point ?  I'm sure the Google's and Amazon's and Alibaba's will have their own version of a enterprise lock you into their ecosystem blockchain as well. 

The biggest fallacy in this article is the "trusted enterprise network" comment. Who trusts Microsoft ?  Who trusts IBM?  Sounds like marketing and  slapping blockchain on a product/platform and convincing  the confused VPs and c-level executives this is the way to go. Then the Wipro's of the world will jump in with 25 year olds who have 20 years of blockchain experience and implement it.

And people will complain a couple years later and write medium articles  and O'Reilly stories and books on why blockchain fails most of the time.    We know this story.  It plays out the same way all the time now. 

Lightning Network explained ...

https://youtu.be/c4slzFdykpc

Good long video that goes into some details about the lightning Network.

GraphQL and graph databases.

Four basics behind a graph database are

Nodes: The primary data elements

Relationships: How two nodes are connected

Nodes may have multiple relationships

Properties: Attributes of a node or of a relationship

Labels: How nodes are described and grouped together as sets

------

Nodes may have multiple labels

Labels get indexed and optimized, making it easier for them to be quickly located

Graph databases shift the focus of their data models to the relationships, which makes retrieving complex data structures much easier.

They abstract nodes and relationships into one structure.

But what is GraphQL ?

https://www.upwork.com/hiring/development/why-facebooks-graphql-language-should-be-on-your-radar/

Graph databases

RDBMS, also known as Relational databases, are  structured and easy to query with a language like SQL, but they have limitations when it comes to unstructured data. And scaling usually means buying far more servers and even then , that has limitations.

Not all data, however, is that easily organized. Semi and Unstructured data like IoT sensor data, social media,.  photos, videos, location-based GIS information, web or mobile activity, and usage metrics can’t be neatly broken down nor should be, but nobody wants a data swamp. 

Things like Hadoop, HBase, Cassandra, MongoDB and other NoSQL or NewSQL like databases trade tables for documents or json or blocks or columnar like schemas and more.  

https://www.business2community.com/brandviews/upwork/the-importance-of-graph-databases-in-an-increasingly-connected-world-02094654

Quantum computing slides

https://speakerdeck.com/ahelwer/quantum-computing-for-computer-scientists

Quantum computing for cs

https://hackaday.com/2018/07/13/quantum-computing-for-computer-scientists/

Dont use IBM.. plain and simple

This is why nobody should use IBM hyperledger fabric and their blockchain.  In due time they will drop it like they drop and mismanage everything.  IBM was one this respected Company, even if they were the 'suits.'. 

Now they are a joke in every single way and people really shouldn't trust anything they release or do.  Because soon enough it'll disappear or have no real support or updates. 

IBM slashing AI staff ....

Polyswarm beta released, come check it out

Polyswarm beta released , security Engineers and developers interested in playing around or testing the system out, take a look.

Peter J

Polyswarm threat intelligence video explainer

Polyswarm network for threat intelligence on a decentralized blockchain explained...

https://youtu.be/kNewwMbPKOE

More clickbait blockchain nonsense articles

I read an article today on wine, alcohol and supply chain and rolled my eyes. 
Things like "…that solution is blockchain…Big companies like Walmart and large grocery stores are already using blockchain to manage supply chain management especially when it comes to food. "

No, no they really aren't. Most of these big companies are actually full of it. They were full of it in the early big data and hadoop days.  They are full of it with the AI and machine learning and data science marketing pitches.  And they are definitely full of it when it comes to blockchain. Many do test.  Many don't have the time, resources or care.  And many don't even like new potentially disruptive Technologies.  Ever. 

Decentralized blockchain?  Yeah Wal-Mart and Amazon and the big banks are all for that.  Not.  They are more for testing private permissioned centralized blockchains. And really there is some need for a system that doesn't give all the transaction information to the world. Transportation and logistics and suppliers have tons of deals and contracts. 

Maybe in due time things will change, but Wal-Mart isn't showing the world how cheap or how difficult it is to negotiate with them.  Or worse , for the vendors, partners and Distributors, killing their price points and value.  

So when people on medium or other social media platforms start writing how it's all changing, maybe they should dig a little deep and provide actually facts and evidence of this. 

In theory these things are great, in reality the Wal-Mart's of the world aren't going to productionize a public decentralized etherium based blockchain system.  In fact Wal-Mart partnered with IBM and made two patents for some kind of "blockchain". 

We know Wal-Mart tried to build their own payment system before and it sucked.  They tried to build their own Netflix at one point too.   Now it seems they want another logistics like payment system and a blockchain that will act like a database.

  It doesn't solve any problem though. If Wal-Mart controls the Walmart blockchain system, that defeats the entire purpose of a decentralized immutable ledger. And why would any one trust Wal-Mart or IBM? 

All we see are many of these big firms jumping on the bandwagon and trying to create another version of a centralized controlled system. And patent it no less, so it's not even open source.  But the clickbait articles jump on this nonsense.

https://medium.com/@jpvehovic/craft-beer-blockchain-32f52feaa31c

What is Hashgraph video explained...

https://youtu.be/RDLdGsDX41s

Help or more dystopian government control ?

Austin , Texas is piloting a program for putting the homeless population on the blockchain. Sounds great and great for society in general. There are some others around the globe attempting something similar.  There is a huge need for poor people and affordable housing as well as homelessness in many many cities and rural areas.  

  But will this be a program to help the homeless or a pseudo subtle attempt to control and know everything about everything and everyone by government agencies and corporations ?  

I used to think a blockchain ID system was the perfect use case for many verticals and industries.  Now it's starting to look like another attempt at control by your typical governments and mega corporations.

  Will it help the homeless or just be another tool to control more people? 

Problem with blockchain and cryptocurrency

The underlying Technology behind blockchain and cryptocurrencies has phenomenal possibilities.  Even using  things like tangles and DAG graph theory (Hashgraph and IOTA in a sense) can change logistics and IOT.   The problem is it's a bunch of fake news. Hype nonsense.  Faux advisors who are snake oil salesmen and sales women with a fancy suit and nice story, not much else. 

Decentralized and disruption?  Not really, it's worse than the dot com and COBOL 1999 ending the world nonsense.  It's clickbait and paid shills on all the media websites. It's great  peer reviews but no real world use case. Or private investors like Goldman Sachs under some other name pumping money into a 'decentralized' company. 

The problem with Ethereum is it's not even decentralized. Most of these blockchains and cryptocurrencies and platforms are not.  Add the ICO and crowd funding and crowd building and crowd marketing nature and it's a lot of wanna be Steve Jobs and Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs.

  At least Bitcoin has a person or person(s) that disappeared years ago and isn't pimping it out at every  conference and Meetup and on social media.  Yes it has core developers that have opinions and ideas and eventual forks, but that's no different than most Apache open source projects.  Then again that's not exactly decentralized or autonomous either. 

And then you have the IBM nonsense. A company with a CEO that should have been fired years ago and an organization that's been irrelevant for twenty years.  Great they built a machine to win on Jeopardy.  Now they pimp that out like it's some advanced AI system.  And they jump on the blockchain bandwagon selling more nonsense and marketing bull.

IBM is a joke and in a year or two they will abandon hyperledger and jump to something new or different.  It's what they do. Any company tying themselves to some IBM backed  hyperledger stellar blockchain is asking to redo it all by 2020.  That's what IBM does.  They did it with Hadoop and big data. They are a terribly run organization.   Why anyone would pay them to use their Technology is confusing to me.  The old saying was "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" should now be "anybody should be fired for buying IBM." Run from them. 

   The problem with blockchain really is it's become just like most of the internet.  It's all based on lies and fake stories.  "Oh build the future" and have nothing more than a white paper.  And sometimes not even that. Oh let's name it Kodak coin or ice tea on the blockchain or whatever. 

The blockchain really needs to be decentralized. And used for what it's good at , not based on some fantasy from people who have no idea how most of the technology actually works. But hey raise 100 million because people are idiots and listen to someone selling them the moon.

There are tons of possibilities and opportunities, but until the nonsense fades and the moon, hodl, and lambo shills fade, it'll be all hype. Until then the people actually building the infrastructure and scale and real world use cases will build in silence, in a sense.