Day: November 5, 2017

It has been an exciting weekend for all cryptocurrencies so far. While most altcoins have lost all of their gains over the past 36 hours, the bigger picture shouldn’t be overlooked whatsoever. All cryptocurrencies in circulation are worth over $200bn right now. A major step forward from the $40bn market cap earlier this year. It is evident Bitcoin is still the king of the hill and that situation will not change whatsoever.

Cryptocurrencies are Booming Despite Volatility

Even though the overall cryptocurrency market cap has finally surpassed the $200bn mark, these markets aren’t less volatile than ever before. In fact, there is more volatility these past few weeks compared to what we have seen throughout most of 2017. This situation is mainly affecting altcoins, though, as they are all struggling to maintain their price levels right now.

Although things may look pretty bleak for most altcoins right now, they are also a contributing factor to the $200bn total market cap. Bitcoin represents the vast majority of this cap, of course, as all BTC in circulation are worth over $125bn right now. That in itself is a pretty spectacular number, considering the total cryptocurrency market cap was under $50bn not too long ago. Things have evolved in a positive direction in this regard.

This also means the Bitcoin Dominance Index has been pushed up once again. Right now, this index sits at 62.5%, clearly indicating how Bitcoin is the go-to cryptocurrency and little else matters these days.  It is only a matter of time until the top altcoins recover in value, although this process may take some time. The Bitcoin price is still mainly driven by speculation, and it is very likely we will see a price correction around the SegWit2x hard fork.

Interestingly enough, there are only two cryptocurrencies with a market cap above $10bn right now. Ethereum still sits in second place, with a cap of just under $28.5bn. Bitcoin Cash is still third, but its cap lost nearly $1.3bn over the past 48 hours. This is not entirely surprising, as the value of BCH was heavily inflated all week long. Things are now returning to normal, with a trading volume that is drying up pretty quickly. It will be interesting to see which coin will be next to attempt and rival Ethereum in terms of market cap.

It is evident this is a major milestone for cryptocurrency as a whole. While a total valuation of $200bn may seem like a lot, it is still a drop in the bucket when looking at traditional companies and instruments. Until cryptocurrency can reach $1tn, very few people will pay attention to developments like these. The growth through 2017 has been pretty spectacular, to say the very least. Going from under $20bn on January 1, 2017, all the way to $201bn on November 5, 2017, is incredibly remarkable.

As is always the case, the bigger question is whether or not this momentum can be sustained for the long run. While some people predict the Bitcoin price will keep on rising, it is doubtful there won’t be a correction whatsoever. Especially the Bitcoin price will see a retrace of some sorts, although it remains to be seen how things will play out. When this correction happens, altcoins will pick up the slack again, though.

Things have gone from bad to worse for Alex Tapscott this past week. Several of his projects have received a lot of scrutiny. Moreover, there are some allegations which have to be rectified as well. Nextblock Global, the company owned by Alex Tapscott, will invest in companies and projects focusing on ICOs. However, the list of advisors for this company is mostly fake. Not a big surprise, but it is still rather worrisome.

Most people in the cryptocurrency world know the name Alex Tapscott. He is a well-known author and Canadian investors. However, his latest business venture raises a lot more questions than answers. Nextblock Global is a very dubious business model, to say the least. Not because of the investing angle, but everything else about it seems pretty fake. Especially the list of alleged advisors contains names which aren’t even associated with this venture.

Trouble Ahead for Nextblock Global

Some of those names include Andreas Antonopoulos and Dmitry Buterin. It is unclear why their names are on the list of advisors, to begin with. Neither of these gentlemen is even remotely connected to this new venture. There are some other names on the page which may also be completely fake, including Vinny Lingham and Kathryn Haun. It is disconcerting to see these names listed on a site they don’t even want to be associated with. It is a common tactic among semi-scammy ICO ventures, though.

The big question is why Alex Tapscott made such a grave mistake. It is evident these names were included to make the company more legitimate. However, it is unclear if this is his doing or someone else’s. The official explanation is how they were “listed in a draft version”. Even so, these names shouldn’t be there unless they agree to be a part of it. A weak explanation, to say the very least. This doesn’t bode well for the future of Nextblock Global either.

It is evident this whole ordeal will cause a lot of heated debate. The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce has rebuked its underwriting of the Nextblock Global public offering. This is the only logical decision as long as these “issues” are still being discussed. It is a very strange and potentially unfortunate turn of events. Whether or not there was any foul play involved, will always remain a question. It won’t do the reputation of Alex Tapscott any favors either right now. Then again, if this is an error, it should all blow over pretty soon.

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INTRODUCTION

Being an abstract concept, beauty has been constantly regarded as a standard to judge a person’s physical attractiveness. Nowadays, thanks to the successful contributions to continuously advanced technologies as well as the changes in defining and evaluating on “beauty”, the word of beauty care has become much more extensive and various. In addition, the trends of beauty care have remained changeable day by day. Even, at the time being, beauty care is not only a request but also a leading priority for almost every male or female individual. With the hope of making more dreams come true, the co-founders of Spa Foundation officially offered their products and service in public.

Until now, Spa Foundation has been recognized as the leading organization of beauty industry without applying cosmetic surgery in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and on its way to conquer the whole Southeast Asian and Asian markets (Myanmar, Thailand). Its own target is to expand on the worldwide, playground in the nearest future.

In the past 3 years, having been continuously invested, developed and managed by talented and enthusiastic founders, Spa Foundation has become the biggest Spa chain in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia with 30 existing branches. Besides, with more than 300 dedicated and professional beauty techniques and more than 8 types of the most up-to-date beauty technologies, Spa foundation has served and satisfied more than 3.000.000 clients.

It’s been guaranteed that when coming to Spa Foundation, clients will be always supplied with the best beauty care services. Its owners also claim that they will continue improving Spa’s quality to live up to clients’ diverse demands.

MISSION

In addition to following the slogan: “Bringing robust beauty and confidence to millions of Asian women”, all staffs of Spa Foundation has always been required to pay attention to its core values, including: delivering the beauty care services with the most advanced methods, improving the quality of Spa worldwide, minimizing costs and expenses, building an ecosystem for global beauty care, using natural extract product suitable for all skin types, giving the priority to customers ‘satisfaction, creating jobs for thousands, and connecting clients with various beauty care systems throughout Asia.

DEVELOPMENT ORIENTATION

It’s time to create a beauty care ecology both at the micro and macro scale by which all Spas member can collaborate and share innovative and effective beauty care methods as well solutions to complicated problems related to marketing, developing strategies. In order to achieve these accomplishments, Spa Foundation has to possess a completely novel business service platform which will facilitate all Southeast Asian users to approach all beauty care products and services, fastening the application of blockchain on Spa coin as well as enable them to make extra income from cryptocurrency ownership. However, Spa’s very first action is to combine beauty care with the assistance of technology 4.0 to connect Spas.

PLATFORM

Regulated by smart contracts, SpaCoin acts as an Ethereum-based Blockchain platform, which assists in improving the quality of beauty care in the world by creating and bringing together beautiful care solutions. Moreover, it develops the beauty care industry, creates market information and helps to solve the constraints on cross-border cosmetic trading and beauty care service. However, it’s believed that the users will control constructing a beauty industry in the future. As a result, it may lead to the disruption of the outdated conventional industries but create new ones.

BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRUSTED REVIEW PLATFORM

Spa Foundation can facilitate clients’ voices to be heard more by creating and implementing the initial platform for reliable spa review. Then, caregivers will have access to valuable market research data and use them as strong tools to enhance the service as well as maintain the relations of loyal clients. A self-made smart agreement helps to minimize any technical related risks and ensure autonomy, confidence, speed, and safety for Spa Foundation’s review platform.

Once this application is carried out, Spa Foundation will receive an enormous variety of benefits. One of them is the opportunity to approach various beauty care services and reinforce the responsibilities of beauty technician towards clients and vice versa. This can be considered as a historic turning point in the roadmap of Spa Foundation to formulate the future for the beauty care industry.

ROADMAP OF SPA FOUNDATION

The brand of Spa Foundation was officially created on August 11^th, 2015. In the next two years, many different branches of Spa Foundation were opened all over the world. On May 4^th2017, Spa Foundation had its own first branches of Cambodia, followed in Laos on September the biggest Spa chains in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It‘s estimated that there will have been about 55 branches of Spa Foundation across Southeast Asia by the end of 2019 and 70 branches in 12 different countries by the end of 2012.

POSSIBILITY OF INDIRECT PROFIT SHARING

The first 50% of Spa’s operating profits will be used to re-invest in following projects supervised by Spa founders. Meanwhile, the remaining 50% of operating profits can be used to re-buy SpaCoin from the market. This will help to decrease global SpaCoin supply and increase its price.

THE CREATION OF SPA TOKEN

The total number of issued Spa Foundation tokens is 150,000,000. The Spa Foundation token is a native Ethereum divisible digital token with up to 8 decimals places.

DEVELOPMENT PLAN

First of all, it’s planned that 50 more branches of Spa Foundation will be established throughout Southeast Asia at the end of the ICO. Next, we will pay attention to develop an independent blockchain system with the commitment of tokens to coins. After that, we will focus on designing and developing Spa’s application for cellphones with convenient and efficient functions, such as: locating, announcing and advertising new services, attractive promotions or updating new beauty care trends in the world. What’s more, payment method via SpaCoin ought to be widely stimulated by offering discount packages from 5-10%. Last but not least, an ecosystem, along with the dentistry, cosmetic shops, and other famous Spa Foundations should be built soon to provide clients with a strong and dynamic ecosystem.

ALLOCATION AND SUPPLY

There are two ways to join in Spa cryptocurrency: purchasing SpaCoin and earning SpaCoin via work. With the former, investors will use SpaCoin purchased before to invest in Spa’s upcoming projects and then, share dividends. For the latter, the business model that SpaCoin prefers is working for one another within this ecosystem while another business model adopted by the majority of the beauty care industry is using SpaCoin as a means of payment.

ITS STRATEGIC PARTNER

To facilitate the transactions via mobile app with Spacoins, Spa Foundation has signed a strategic partnership agreement with Trustpay. Trustpay is one of the leading pioneer company in Vietnam launching prepaid Visa/ Mastercard TRUSTcard. TRUSTpay is in operations with more than 220.000 TRUSTcard issued, 30.000 users accounts, 1,200 accepted transaction locations, 450 locations giving discounts rate if transactions are done via TRUSTpay, 3.800 online shops, 220 franchise partners. TRUSTpay’s strategic partners are well-known in the industry such as VNPT EPAY, Telepay, Webmoney Vietnam, Peacesoft. Having TRUSTpay as its strategic partners in this project, users can be at ease will all their Spacoins payment transactions via SPA mobile app.

FUNDS DISTRIBUTION

For the first 40% of Business Development, it’s necessary to hunt an experienced and competent CEO who can build up and lead a qualified sale team. They are expected to put our best foot forward at beauty care seminars, conferences, fairs and other events. For next 20% of Marketing: the expenses will be used for partnership development and direct consumer marketing. With another 20% of Software and Infrastructure, the latest technologies play extremely important role in enabling us to perform our tasks and the platform is on the cutting edge of the industry. As for the remaining 20% of Contingencies, there are always unforeseen challenges that arise when operating a business and a certain amount of our budget will be allocated to deal with those types of circumstances.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, with the considerable benefits and positive effects in terms of costs, quality and potential popularity of SpaCoin, we believe that this SpaCoin will be a disruptive factor in the beauty industry. It’s possible that this kind of cryptocurrency will make a historic revolution and infuse a fresh spirit in the beauty industry in particular and the development of society in general.

CROWDSALE

ICO Start Date 15:00 GMT, November 13th 2017
ICO End Date 15:00 GMT, November 26th 2017
Total Tokens Amount 150 000 000 SPA
Crowdsale Tokens Amount 80 000 000 SPA
Currency Accepted BTC, ETH

2 ROUNDS OF CROWDSALE

Round 1: 5,000,000 SPA token will be sold every day at 15:00 GMT.
Start: November 13th 2017
End: November 22th 2017
Token Exchange Rate: SPA/BTC = 0.000012 (1200 satoshi)

SPA/ETH rates will be updated on the website on a hourly basis.

Round 2: 7,500,000 SPA token will be sold every day at 15:00 GMT.
Start: November 23th 2017
End: November 26th 2017
Token Exchange Rate: SPA/BTC = 0.000012 (1200 satoshi).
SPA/ETH rates will be updated on the website once every hour.

Softcap: 300BTC ̴ 6000 ETH
Hardcap: 1200BTC ̴ 24000 ETH

Website: https://spacoin.io/
Whitepaper: https://spacoin.io/whitepaper_spacoin_final.pdf
Contact SpaCoin: [email protected]

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Network nodes have always been a topic of debate in the Bitcoin world. Especially when it comes to forks of Bitcoin aiming to dethrone the real thing. SegWit2x nodes are mainly hosting on AWS and other centralized services. With the number of nodes now growing again, a new debate has arisen. There is no natural growth in this case whatsoever, but that is no real surprise either.

There is a big difference between hosting a node and running a full node. Anyone can set up a node through a VPS or similar service provider. Amazon is a very popular platform in this regard, as is DigitalOcean. However, this centralized approach to provide nodes for  a decentralized network isn’t the right approach whatever. Then again, it beefs up the numbers and makes things look better than they are.

SegWit2x Adoption Remains Questionable

It seems we have such “growth” with SegWit2x nodes right now. The numbers are growing exponentially, which is interesting. This is not natural growth by any means, though. Adding a few hundred notes over  a week means they are spun up on VPS servers once again. This also means the number of nodes will effectively drop off sooner or later. We have seen similar behavior with Bitcoin Classic not too long ago.

It is evident someone wants to make SegWit2x look more appealing than it is. Support for this fork has diminished quite a bit as of late. A lot of companies are pulling support due to the fork not being viable”. If the chain will be mined, it will end up as an altcoin. There is more interest in Bitcoin Cash than SegWit2x right now. Even though the nodes and some fancy websites may state otherwise, that is the reality. There is no reason to inflate the number of centralized nodes whatsoever.

Anyone can run their own full node. All it takes is decent hardware and enough disk space. Even a Raspberry Pi 3 can run a full node for any implementation of Bitcoin. It is odd to see so few people effectively do so. though. Bitcoin itself has a fair few centralized nodes as well. However, node numbers should never be considered a metric of adoption. It is a fake number that has little meaning these days. It is a good tool for political reasons, but that is about it.

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Over the past two weeks, the bitcoin price has demonstrated a meteoric rise in value, increasing from $5,400 to $7,300, without the existence of a major market in China.

In September, the Chinese government and its central bank the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) cracked down on cryptocurrency trading, requesting leading bitcoin exchanges such as OKCoin, Huobi, and BTCC to shut down temporarily and halt their services. Consequently, the three companies along with other minor cryptocurrency companies relocated to Hong Kong.

CnLedger, a trusted cryptocurrency news source in China, revealed that many of the Chinese cryptocurrency trading platforms like OKCoin and Huobi plan to launch over-the-counter (OTC) exchanges in Hong Kong to allow investors to trade bitcoin with the Chinese yuan, Hong Kong dollar, and other currencies.

OkEx (and likely, Huobi-Pro) will soon launch P2P bitcoin tradings with various fiat currency support.

— cnLedger (@cnLedger) October 30, 2017

What Happens if China Resumes Cryptocurrency Trading

Panos Mourdoukoutas, Professor at LIU Post in New York and Columbia University, noted that in the past month, bitcoin has demonstrated its resilience towards global markets instability and towards the Chinese market. More importantly, Mourdoukoutas emphasized that bitcoin has shown it can survive without China, which used to be a major bitcoin market prior to the cryptocurrency trading ban.

“Apparently, Bitcoin can survive and thrive without China, provided there are developments that keep the confidence and hype for the digital currency alive, and and provided that money remains cheap,” wrote Mourdoukoutas.

Evidently, bitcoin has survived through the abrupt ban on cryptocurrency trading by the Chinese government, achieving new all-time highs and breaking through the $7,000 region.

But, in the past few weeks, rumours around the possibility of the Chinese government resuming cryptocurrency trading have resurfaced, as the re-election of Chinese President Xi Jinping nears. Almost immediately after the cryptocurrency trading ban by China, several researchers including Jon Creasy explained that the Chinese government likely established a temporary ban on bitcoin trading to appeal to the communist party.

“President Xi Jinping is preparing for his October 18th reelection, and wants to appeal to his Communist voting bloc. My prediction is this: as soon as President Xi Jinping is reelected — and he will be — conservative, free(er)-trade legislation will be put in place, and Bitcoin exchanges will be reinstated. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Chinese government encouraging certain exchanges and cryptocurrencies, once this legislation hits,” said Creasy.

China’s Impact on the Mid-Term Price Trend of Bitcoin

China is no longer able to negatively affect the price of bitcoin, as shown in the cryptocurrency trading ban in September. But, the resumption of cryptocurrency trading by the Chinese government could lead bitcoin price to new highs, as China was still a major market with around 10 percent of the global bitcoin exchange market share prior to the ban.

If China resumes cryptocurrency trading by early 2018 as analysts like Creasy suggest, the price of bitcoin could potentially surge towards the interim target of experts such as Keiser, at $10,000.

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