A potential conversation that banks may be having about Bitcoin is depicted on Mr Robot.

They even hit on Bitcoin weakness (transaction limits).

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Arcade City, the decentralized ride sharing service that will compete with Uber and run on Bitcoin, is available on the Apple App Store.

I downloaded the app and logged in. The message I got was below:

Arcadians in San Diego need a combined 1307402 karma to reach City Level 1 and unlock ridesharing functionality.

Current city Karma: 68 out of 1,307,402.

How much fucking karma do we need for you to include commas in large numbers? What I get from this message is that more people need to sign up for the service to be used in San Diego.

I give props to Arcade City for what they are attempting to do. I take props away for doing it so poorly.

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Bitcoin hits resistance at $630 and shits the bed back to $600 in less than an hour.

Possible cause? Who the fuck knows. You have to love the volatility of Cryptocurrencies. Was it Hillary passing out at World Trade? Did some Chinese news hit?

Cryptocurrency makes Chinese Burritos look like old man 401k stocks.

Industry change (fintech) isn’t always pretty or smooth.

Happy Sunday.

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Here’s an interview with Riccardo Spagni AKA FluffyPony who is a core developer of the cryptocurrency Monero.

One of the interviewers spends the first couple minutes using a sharpie to draw a tie on his shirtless body.

In the first five minutes they joke about FluffyPony’s involvement in Monero as him playing the “long con” and his planned “exit scam”.

You can not make this shit up.

Then they get down to business and speak about Monero, programming, merchants etc.

Cryptocurrencies are here to stay and these are the early and important movers and shakers. Welcome to a whole new world.

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One year chart. Gold performed well over past 12 months but Bitcoin performed better.

Bitcoin will crush your dreams if you chase it. It’s up from $575 to $630. Above this resistance we have $700+ within reach. A trip back to $575 would be a buying opportunity.

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http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000548776

Couple of interesting statements:

There are 4,000 $100 bills in circulation for every man, woman and child in the US. In many foreign countries up to 90% of US bills are $100 denominations.

Regarding Bitcoin he states “They allow it for now and they’ll prevent it in the future”. Other than outlawing Bitcoin, like FDR outlawed gold, that shows massive ignorance on the ability to control Bitcoin.

“We’re not even a big cash printing country compared to Japan.” Go USA!

“The government makes a fortune off printing cash.” No kidding!

This guy is an asshat of the first order.

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Bitcoin has been in a relatively stable range with a midpoint of $570.

Within past few hours we’ve printed $597. A move of ~5% is not a big deal on the Bitcoin volatility scale but is this the start of an upside move, a bull trap or just a blip? Bitcoiners are watching closely.

Overall Bitcoin has been in an uptrend in 2016. Bitcoin just printed a 3 box reversal on the 6H PNF chart. Levels to watch are $615 and $650. On the downside $560 and $530.

Sundays are sometimes big trading days for Bitcoin (driven by Chinese?).

I am grabbing some popcorn and hoping for a good show.

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I downloaded the Brave Browser and I am impressed. Sites are loading faster than Chrome and all the annoying ads are gone. Brave also has a built in Bitcoin wallet to reward sites I visit most via micropayments.

As an example, CNN is a pig of a site that takes 5-10 seconds to fully load in Chrome. That extra time between when the first images appear and the site is fully displayed is the loading of the different ads, site trackers, Facebook plug ins and complete crap snooping your personal information. In Brave CNN loads almost instantly. A peek at the Brave settings shows the following for CNN:

From Cointelegraph:

On the desktop, Brave provides a 40% to 60% speed increase and a 2-4x speed increase on mobile devices. Mobile users see a direct reduction in both battery and data plan consumption. Brave also protects users with leading privacy and security features such as HTTPS Everywhere (encrypted data traffic), fingerprinting shields, phishing protection, malware filtering, and script blocking.

 

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Le Fly posted about YouTube blocking certain content creators. Reminds me of Twitter and Facebook “curating” their users’ newsfeeds.

Should we be surprised? No. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

This type of subjective censorship won’t last on the Internet. There are now decentralized competitors popping up in many areas: Arcade City vs Uber, Steemit vs Reddit, YouTube vs ????.

An example of a shift against monopolistic control driven by ad revenue is a new browser on the market called Brave. Their Mission:

….to save the web by increasing browsing speed and safety for users, while growing ad revenue share for content creators.

The Brave Browser team are removing the middle man and enabling payments to content creators directly in the browser. Sounds like YouTube/Facebook’s worst nightmare.

Introducing Brave Payments

As part of our 0.11.6 release of Brave for desktop today, we are pleased to announce the beta version of Brave Payments, our Bitcoin-based micropayments system that can automatically and privately pay your favorite websites.

For the first time in the history of web browsers, people can now seamlessly reward the sites whose content they value and wish to support, while remaining untracked by anyone, including us at Brave Software, Inc. This removes the need for intermediaries who may overwhelm web pages with invasive trackers and ads (and sometimes even malware). It also avoids centrally managed “feed” algorithms that may or may not value your idea of content quality.

Decentralized mircopayments to content creators cut out the middle man. Add in privacy and an open system…what’s not to like?

This concept is in pre early adopter phase but it’s happening in many industries. Most projects will fail, but new projects will take their place.

So while YouTube, Twitter and Facebook pick and choose what is good for their users the Internet is striving to be free (from censorship) again.

The question is, does Joe Public care about monopolistic entities censoring the Internet for them or have we given up those rights for the easiest possible access to cat videos?

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Bitcoin is easy to mock. With Kim Dotcom, Mike Tyson, Mike Karpeles, Winklevii and Roger Ver as public faces of Bitcoin it’s tempting to write Bitcoin off as a nerd money fad.

However, things change quickly. Remember, only nerds used computers less than 20 years ago. Now everyone owns smartphones, tablets and 1-2 computers.

The video below does a good job showing the legitimate side of Bitcoin while also putting the adoption curve of any new tech in perspective with regards to cryptocurrency.

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