Day: April 1, 2018

Solving one of the most prominent issues in the data and AI industry

The world’s first university backed ICO, Thought.live, is developing the first mineable public AI blockchain, which will create a completely new way of utilizing the data generated by our society.

Thought is embedding smart logic and AI into every bit of information, making information aware of its origin and able to act on its own to accomplish its purpose.

Thought patented technology of making data smart reduces the need for external applications that until this point have been required, increasing processing speed and decreasing the complexity associated with these application. In addition, it decreases the problem with the exponentially increasing amounts of data.

“With the advancements in technology we are also experiencing an increase in information created by our society. Everything from social media to human genome research generates data, and we are already struggling to process it all.“ Explains Professor Andrew Hacker, the CEO of Thought. “With Smart Data, we can usher in a whole new paradigm of active data, where we can do the things we want more securely, efficiently, quickly and intelligently.”

Introducing unparalleled security to artificial intelligence

Sam Jones, the Chief Software Engineer of Thought: “Using blockchain technology allows us to protect every bit of information with multi-layered encryption, creating the highest level of security.“

“Being able to secure individual bits of data is like the Holy Grail of cybersecurity.” Adds Professor Hacker, who in addition to running Thought is a cybersecurity expert in residence at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, which is one of Thought’s closest partners.

Bringing equality to the monopolistic world of AI

In addition to vastly improving the security of information by integrating blockchain technology and multi-level encryption, Though opens up many new opportunities in the field of artificial intelligence.

One of the main aspects of Thought is their ecosystem where data is used as the commodity. Until this point AI and data analytics has been the playground for giant corporations who have billions of dollars and millions of active users. The smaller guys who don’t have such funding are left out of the game. Thought’s ecosystem will change that, giving everyone the possibility to access AI and valuable data for reasonable prices.

“AI, by its very nature, must be personalized in order to be accepted and effective. AI cannot remain trapped at Google, Amazon, Microsoft or IBM – it is designed to help people, not only huge companies. There’s no way AI gets developed to its greatest potential if it’s only limited to these large enterprises.” Says Matthew Hykes, Chief Software Archidect of Thought.

“Until this day, access to AI and big data has been limited to only a handful of organizations, but for seeing true innovation take place, AI and data have to become easily accessed and available to everyone who’s looking to work with this emerging technology.” Says Nathaniel DiMemmo, COO of Thought.

The importance of a great team

Nathaniel adds: „Coming up with world-changing ideas and realizing them to bring the state of the art innovations to the world, have always been the priorities for our team. Our team has worked together for years, developing the next thing that will take the field of artificial intelligence and data handling to the next level.“

„It is incredible to witness how our team is able to crush one obstacle after another with collective passion, even if it requires sleepless nights and 20-hour workdays.“ Says Andrew Hacker. „Three patents and 10 years of work later, things are finally coming together. Every day interest and support behind our project increases dramatically and we are powering towards to the completion of our platform.“

Collaboration with Harrisburg University

„We’re proud of Andrew’s accomplishments and are honored to have him as a valuable member of Harrisburg University,” said the President of Harrisburg University Dr. Eric Darr. „The upcoming release of this new technology, Thought, and its applications for businesses and consumers in AI and analytics represents the bleeding edge of innovation. Harrisburg University looks forward to continuing its work with Mr. Hacker and Thought as they continue developing new and valuable technology.“

„We are not only developing AI, we are educating people on this new field. Working closely with Harrisburg University has allowed us to bring knowledge to thousands of people, bringing great AI blockchain technology to the forefront and training a new generation of people knowleageable in the latest advancements in tech.“ Says Professor Hacker.

Join the ICO

Thought’s ICO is live now. Sign up at https://thought.live to receive a 10% discount on your purchase until the end of March. From the 1st of April to the end of the ICO on the 30th of April participants receive a 5% discount.

This is a sponsored press release and does not necessarily reflect the opinions or views held by any employees of The Merkle. This is not investment, trading, or gambling advice. Always conduct your own independent research.

Over the past few weeks, the mainstream media has tried to justify the extreme volatility of the cryptocurrency market, and specifically the price movements of bitcoin, by connecting them to news.

This week, several media outlets reported that the price of bitcoin had fallen from $9,000 to $8,000 due to the ban imposed by Twitter on cryptocurrency-related advertisements. In a report, CNBC stated that the price of bitcoin had declined by 40 percent after Twitter released its strict policy on regulating cryptocurrency and ICO advertisements.

In reality, when the report was released, the price of bitcoin had declined by 12 percent, and the movement did not coincide with Twitter’s ban on cryptocurrency ads. The social media giant happened to have banned ICO ads when the most dominant digital currency in the cryptocurrency market was starting to lose momentum.

There exist a wide range of factors that could have contributed to the price movements of bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies. Several analysts have attributed the recent decline in the price of bitcoin to the futures market operated by the Chicago Board Options Exchange (Cboe) and CME Group. PhilCrypto, a respected cryptocurrency researcher, stated that the decline in the price of bitcoin from $8,000 to $7,000 coincided with the Cboe bitcoin futures market demonstrating record volumes.

It is entirely possible that institutional investors and retail traders are manipulating the market in order to cash out their short contracts or futures contracts, and that explains the sudden surge in the price of bitcoin from $8,000 to $20,000, and the abrupt drop in bitcoin’s value from $20,000 to $6,000.

But according to Bill Barhydt, the CEO of cryptocurrency remittance company Abra, there exists a lack of demand from institutional investors and retail traders from the West, in contrast to places like Japan and South Korea. Contrary to the anticipation of the cryptocurrency community, the debut of the Cboe and CME bitcoin futures markets were poor, and the U.S. bitcoin futures market struggled to demonstrate rapidly increasing interest in the cryptocurrency market among institutional investors.

Aaron Brown, former Managing Director and Head of Financial Market Research at AQR Capital Management, emphasized that while bitcoin price movements have been smooth throughout the launch of the US bitcoin futures market, little interest was shown toward cryptocurrency investment vehicles.

“There was little interest in the derivative contracts, which account for only a few thousand Bitcoin, out of a circulating supply of 17 million. Institutions mostly stayed on the sidelines. No new vehicles for retail investment emerged. Bitcoin prices did not stabilize: They continued to move at around 100 percent annualized volatility, as they have for most of the currency’s history,” Brown wrote.

In addition to the slow growth rate of the US bitcoin futures market, the decline in the adoption of bitcoin by retailers and strict regulations imposed on both businesses and investors could have contributed to bitcoin’s price drop.

Hence, it is illogical to conclude that the decline has been caused by news such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter banning blockchain and ICO advertisements, and it is far-fetched to justify each price movement as based on a particular market event.

Crypto hardware wallet Ledger Nano is Nevadans’ favorite over 2017 Xmas. #NEWS

Even with the exponential growth that the internet has seen over the past couple of decades, the mechanisms for web monetization that exist today remain quite archaic and susceptible to manipulation. Also, the sentiment of the average person towards web advertisements is quite poor, and in the past year or so, the use of ad blockers has become quite commonplace.

The Oyster Protocol, or Oyster Pearl, is an all-new platform that employs a unique approach to getting content publishers and consumers to work with one another, thereby enabling both parties to benefit monetarily. To be more specific, Oyster Pearl enables everyday internet users to store and retrieve their files via a system that is decentralized, anonymous and secure.

Oyster Pearl has been devised specifically to remedy the stalemate that exists between advertisers and ad-blockers. This is achieved by empowering a website to generate revenue by adopting a single line of code that is specific to the platform.

In addition to this, the service makes use of a decentralized online storage system that has been conceived through the use of the Ethereum blockchain along with IOTA’s Tangle protocol. The result is Oyster Pearl, a unique product that allows users to employ its native currency to generate value for themselves as well as content distributors.

Overview

• Oyster Pearl provides internet users with a decentralized and private method of data storage.
• Network participants are reimbursed in the form of native Pearl tokens.
• Independent users can join the platform quite easily and can also monetize their content directly by uploading their data straight onto the decentralized ledger.
• Website owners and content publishers receive incentives for providing ad-free content and contributing to the data storage network.
• The interface is quite simple and straightforward.

Key Features

To kick things off, we can see that Oyster Pearl provides users with solutions to two key problems that currently plague the internet as a whole. 

1. It provides users with a stable decentralized data storage medium.
2. It helps eliminate the need for web ads.

Key features on offer

Since a large number of online advertisements carry with them malware and other unwanted entities, Oyster Pearl helps mitigate issues related to virus infections and other performance problems which might otherwise affect computer devices.

Similarly, from the perspective of online revenue generation, the Oyster Protocol establishes a financial stream through the use of a unique code-script algorithm. The platform allows users to contribute a small portion of their CPU and GPU power to enable data storage on a decentralized and anonymous ledger. This allows for mutual monetary compensation for all of the involved parties.

One of the standout features of this system is that all of the information that is uploaded through the aforementioned Oyster script is processed via IOTA’s Tangle mechanism. This not only helps eliminate redundancy issues, but also reduces the problem of data mitigation.

How Oyster Pearl Works

As is clear by now, Oyster Pearl makes use of IOTA’s Tangle protocol to maintain its internal transactions in a smooth and streamlined fashion. Tangle is essentially a Directed Acyclic Graph, which means that it serves as a blockless distributed ledger system.

Primary revenue code-script employed by Oyster Pearl

Every transaction processed on this platform has to undergo a PoW (Proof of Work) mechanism before it can be confirmed and added to the blockchain. Each transaction comes with an intrinsic payload capacity which is used to obtain vital storage information from within the system.

It is also important to understand that each transaction has to go via a defined mesh-net of nodes that are based within a peer-to-peer network. Each node has the capacity to retain a redundant copy of the transactions, thus allowing for reduced data copies within the system mainframe.

Meshed framework deployed by the platform

Lastly, the Tangle protocol also helps heavily mitigate the risk of data loss without relying on a centralized hosting provider. This is because Tangle-based nodes are designed to automatically get rid of old data once they reach their physical storage limits.

About the Project

Oyster Protocol has demonstrated tremendous potential in the past couple of months, and thus it can be useful for readers to learn more about the people associated with this project.

Bill Cordes is the CFO of this venture. Bill has been in the finance and digital sector for over a decade now, and has previously worked at:

• Infogix Inc. — Director of Corporate Development and M&A
• NextGen — Venture Partner and Collaborator
• Cordes Consulting— Founder

Alex Firmani is the CTO of this project. He too has been in the digital domain for nearly two decades and has worked at high-profile companies such as Amazon.

Lastly, Taylor French is the Head of Communications and Design for Oyster Pearl. On his LinkedIn profile, Taylor describes himself as a “seasoned UX/UI design professional with extensive experience in design and communications”.

Token Performance Data

All internal transactions that take place on the platform are facilitated through the use of a native currency which is abbreviated as PRL.

 PRL token lifetime performance chart (courtesy of CoinMarketCap)

Released into the market late last year, PRL tokens were initially valued at US$0.032. However, the currency made a huge push earlier this year and scaled up to an impressive US$4.30 per coin.

The recent performance of PRL has not been as amazing, but considering the bear run that the markets seem to have been going through for the past few months, the token has remained quite stable in value (US$1.00 per coin as of March 31, 2018).

Final Thoughts

With the online advertising market slowly diminishing in size due to the use of ad blockers, Oyster Protocol is offering content providers and distributors with a novel system that has the potential to reinvigorate this market sector.

Judging by the steady performance of the PRL token since its inception, it would not be surprising to see more and more people adopt this platform in the coming months.

If you would like to invest in Oyster Pearl, PRL trading pairs are currently being exchanged on platforms such as KuCoin, Cryptopia, IDEX, and CoinExchange.

A lot of cryptocurrency enthusiasts do not like regulation. This is a hot topic of conversation right now, especially in lieu of the recent G20 meeting. While no immediate measures were represented, it seems the governing body will introduce taxation guidelines in July.

The G20 Remains on top of Cryptocurrency

It is safe to say the recent Bitcoin price dip is partially caused by G20 meeting concerns. Many investors were concerned this governing body will impose regulation at some point. So far, it seems nothing major will happen in the near future. However, the most recent meeting also seems to kick off future taxation guidelines. More specifically, such measures will go into effect in July of 2018, by the look of things.

With the effective regulation of cryptocurrency been postponed until that date, there’s still a lot of speculation taking place. The G20 officials are seemingly mainly interested in cryptocurrency taxation as of right now. It is very difficult to tax such currencies which are not controlled by a company or government. So far, it seems there is no unified taxation guideline either.

That situation may come to change in July of 2018. Introducing such guidelines will certainly shake things up quite a bit. For now, we have to wait and see how the G20 decides to tackle this problem moving forward. With their earlier meeting being rather positive toward cryptocurrencies, it remains to be seen if that positive tone can be maintained.

The Positive Attitude Remains in Place

The most recent G20 meeting was pretty positive for Bitcoin and altcoins. With no desire to ban cryptocurrency trading or introduce licensing requirements a la BitLicense, the positive tone is certainly present. Introducing taxation guidelines may turn out to be a positive development overall. After all, taxation means cryptocurrencies become legal tender in the eyes of most people.

This positive attitude came at an interesting time. A few weeks prior, the Bank of England governor warned about a major regulatory crackdown Regulation cryptocurrencies to address illicit activities is a positive message viral. However, it seems the majority of the G20 doesn’t necessarily agree with a harsh course of action as of right now.

How all of this will play out, remains to be seen. It appears South Korea wants to take the lead on cryptocurrency taxation. That in itself is a remarkable development, although a positive one as well. Given the country’s position in the world of cryptocurrency, it is evident their decision-making carries significant weight. The future continues to look bright for cryptocurrencies, especially if the G20 maintains the current approach.

Image From Shutterstock

The post South Korea Will Release Bitcoin Taxation Policy in July, Following G20 Meeting appeared first on NewsBTC.

Bitcoin Press Release: UK based Smart Startup Company, founded by social and technology entrepreneur Simon Krystman promises to make it simple for ordinary businesses to benefit from the transparency and security provided by the blockchain, by launching SMRT (Smart Startup Token) contracts. The aim is to create a frictionless trade platform for startups and SMEs.

1st of April, 2018, United Kingdom –  SMRT describes itself as a “vending machine for legal documents” that are then secured in the blockchain. The need to create contracts can be extremely onerous for start-ups, in terms of both money and time. Blockchain offers the opportunity to make enforcement cheaper and easier. However, few small businesses have the resources or understanding of blockchain technology to utilise it. The SMRT templates will cover the contractual areas that startups and small businesses encounter, such as shareholder and intellectual property agreements. They will also cover finance and trading agreements in the way the Ethereum blockchain was originally designed for.

Simon Krystman CEO of SMRT explained:

“Established trading marketplaces could benefit enormously from our smart contracts, as buyers and sellers will have automatically enforced agreements to transfer money for goods and services. They also open the way for many new decentralised marketplaces, where the smart contracts are the enforcements of trade. Small businesses would be able to buy bundles of our smart contract templates to facilitate their sell/buy trades.”

The Pre Token Sale for participators is now open and ends on the 21st April 2018. Pre Token Sale participants will receive a 50% Bonus for any SMRT contributions.

The Team

The SMRT team are highly skilled and experienced in running successful businesses. They have a wide variety of talent, connections and expertise in blockchain, AI, entrepreneurship, funding, intellectual property, government and regulation, giving SMRT a very solid base. Some team members are working in an advisory capacity, while holding down high-profile jobs in industry, government and academia. Others are working full time to build the infrastructure of a world leading company. Upon completion of the Token Sale, the team will be expanding to bring onboard more in-house software developers, lawyers and finance specialists, building an internal infrastructure and one to manage partners.

Syed Kamall, Member of the European Parliament is the Regulatory Advisor to the SMRT Project, advised;

“The technology offers some very exciting opportunities but as legislators internationally, we must also make sure that consumers have trust in it. Blockchain and smart contracts will be a game changer for startups.”

Simon Krystman CEO of SMRT concluded;

“The core of our company is the marriage of legal agreements with blockchain software code, supported by data science and AI. Our key partners represent this core and employ leading practitioners in their respective domains.”

50% Bonus for Pre Token Sale Contributors

Visit https://smartstartuptoken.tech to find out more and join the Pre Token Sale now.

To learn more visit the Website : https://smartstartuptoken.tech
Meet the Team: https://smartstartuptoken.tech/
Read the WhitePaper – https://smartstartuptoken.tech/smrt-whitepaper-v1.pdf
Connect on Twitter – https://twitter.com/SmrtToken

Media Contact
Contact Name: Mike
Contact Email: [email protected]

Smart Startup is the source of this content. Virtual currency is not legal tender, is not backed by the government, and accounts and value balances are not subject to consumer protections. This press release is for informational purposes only. The information does not constitute investment advice or an offer to invest.

About Bitcoin PR Buzz -Bitcoin PR Buzz has been proudly serving the PR and marketing needs of Bitcoin and digital currency tech start-ups for over 5 years. Get your own professional Bitcoin Press Release. Click here for more information about Bitcoin PR

The post PR: Smart Startup Leverages Blockchain To Bring Smart Contracts to the Masses appeared first on BitcoinNews.com.

It seems today will be another abysmal day for most cryptocurrency markets. As the total market cap keeps dwindling, all individual currencies are feeling the pressure. The way things look right now, the Tron price is seemingly poised to head quite a lot lower in the near future. Its market cap is also heading below $2bn if this trend keeps up for much longer.

The Tron Price Faces Massive Corrections

This past month has been anything but great for all cryptocurrencies. The Tron price illustrates this point perfectly, as it has lost nearly 40% in value over the past 30 days. These past 24 hours alone, the Tron price dipped by 17.84%, which effectively puts its value at $0.03. This is not the trend most speculators have been waiting for, to say the very least.

Even though Tron now as a test net, most holders seemingly don’t care in the slightest. Ever since that release, the project’s market cap has dropped by nearly $900m, which further goes to show the negative pressure in the cryptocurrency world continues to build up. With the Tron price now looking poised to dip below $0.03 and the market cap heading below $2bn, things are not looking too great for Tron.

It is also interesting to see how Bitcoin and Ethereum are dragging Tron down right now. Even though now is a precarious time for altcoins to make their mark against these two currencies, the Tron price is losing ground due to ongoing struggles in both markets. With a 12.84% dip against Bitcoin and a 12.48% decline against Ethereum, the Tron price has no stable support level to speak of right now.

While Tron maintains a trading volume of $219.65m in the past 24 hours, it’s evident people want to exit this altcoin market first and foremost. What is driving that decision all of a sudden, is a different matter altogether. Until Bitcoin and/or Ethereum recovers spectacularly, we will see a lot more negative pressure across all markets. Tron will be no exception in this regard.

As of right now, Binance is the biggest trading platform for Tron with its BTC pair. Upbit and Huobi are duking it out for second and third place, with Bittrex not too far behind. All of these developments are pretty interesting, although it is evident there is no influx of fresh capital for Tron right now. Its first fiat market comes in 14th place thanks to Ethfinex’s TRX/USD trading pair.

For the time being, it seems the Tron price will continue to decline for some time to come. This is painfully evident right now, as it seems highly unlikely the cryptocurrency markets will recover from this ongoing onslaught anytime soon. Eventually, the market will turn around, but for now, we still need to get rid of some overvalued currencies first and foremost.

The creator of the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency has floated a possible change to the network’s long-opaque ether issuance policy.

After this month’s G20 meeting, South Korea is working on crypto tax regulations to be ready by June #NEWS