You know things are bad when the comedians have it in for you. In November, Sacha Baron Cohen went viral. The comedian has pulled some pretty good pranks in the past, but this video didn’t show him fooling a politician as a rapper or playing a journalist from Kazakhstan. The vid showed him as himself delivering a speech to the Anti-Defamation League. The focus of the speech was Internet companies in general and social media in particular. He called them “the greatest propaganda machine in history,” attacked Facebook, and called on platforms to slow down and check facts before publishing content. But where does social media think it’s going now?

It’s not just comedians who think that social media needs disruption.

Elizabeth Warren has called for the break-up of what she calls “Big Tech.” Amazon, Facebook, and Google, she says, have too much power over the economy, society, and democracy. “They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. In the process, they have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation.” Her administration would unwind mergers and break up all three companies.

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Other tech firms are feeling the pressure.

Twitter, now a channel for outrage and anger, has tried to pre-empt criticism by banning paid political advertising. YouTube influencers now have to head into the boxing ring to keep the audience’s attention. And China’s TikTok is the talk of the town while Snapchat is nowhere to be seen.

What’s going right with social media? What’s going wrong? And why will social media be alright in the end?

The reason that politicians and others are so worried about the power of social media is that it’s still so popular. Facebook has nearly 2.5 billion monthly users.

Twitter is still the place to be for breaking news and discussions. Influencers might now look like an identical series of make-up artists, beauticians, and attention-grabbers, but brands are still keen to use them. Some reports suggest that the price of an Instagram post rose 44 percent over the last year.

As far as social media is concerned, everything is great.

Platforms are still delivering services that people want to use, building audiences, and attracting advertisers. If it wasn’t working — it wouldn’t be popular. And if it wasn’t popular, there wouldn’t be a problem.

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What’s going wrong is actually one thing that’s gone right — and there’s one thing social media can’t fix.

The thing that’s gone right is the building of monopolies. That’s bad news for consumers but good news for the monopoly. Every business owner wants a lock on the market. Competition is a great principle — right up until someone else is trying to eat your lunch.

There are already a couple of fixes for that problem.

• First, the United States has anti-trust laws and regulators who are supposed to prevent companies from dominating marketplaces.
• The big monopolies are against the law, but can be given bigger teeth — and there’s a good chance they will be.
• Bigger monopolies reign and are building despite laws.
•  Monopolies are gaining in power and size despite the lobbyists declaring that the social media giants are paying to protect their interests.

It’s not entirely clear that drastic action is needed — or is it?

Facebook might have a monopoly now but so did MySpace until Facebook wiped it out. The rise of TikTok has shown that it is still possible for an innovative new product to disrupt the market and steal an audience.

Is the social media climate a winner-takes-all environment — but a new winner can quickly take it all away.

One new direction for social media could be a platform that offers users real control over their privacy and their data while still keeping them in touch with their old school friends. That could be much more dangerous to Facebook than anything Elizabeth Warren could think of.

The thing that social media platforms can’t fix is the issue of free speech.

Mark Zuckerberg’s argument for refusing to take political ads is that he can’t police the truthfulness of political advertising. He can only make clear who’s paying for it and who’s seeing it. Sacha Baron Cohen argues that social media companies are smart enough to create algorithms to remove white supremacist hate speech, and they may be.

But who should they be the ones deciding what speech should be removed and what should stay? Do we want the likes of Zuch and Cohen to determine what can and cannot be said? Is that what we want in the U.S.?

Someone has to program the algorithms — and someone will always object to the rules written into them.

It’s likely that the eventual solution won’t be in banning speech but in returning to the principle underlying free speech. Fair speech has to include the clash of ideas. Bad ideas will then be rejected and good ideas will advance. We’re not doing very well in that battle at the moment.

People’s judgments are struggling against an outsized flow of information and an ability to block out opinions they don’t want to hear.

The direction of social media is to make that situation change by improving education in critical thinking, in identifying misinformation, in overcoming our own biases, and in being willing to admit that we could be wrong.

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How do you police speech?

Social media firms have found themselves with products that are incredibly popular. The products have given the companies themselves temporary but huge monopoly power. Now, social media is having to grapple with one of society’s biggest questions: how do you police speech?

Social Media can’t answer that question. But as everyone else—comedians and politicians alike—try to answer it for them — social may well come up with answers that improve everyone.

The post Where Does Social Media Think it’s Going Now? appeared first on ReadWrite.

Members of a community share a set of views. They think the same way about at least one thing, whether that’s politics, a football team, a cause, or a favorite choice of toothpaste. A community has at least one thought, issue, feeling, concern, or a goal in common.

But having and maintaining only one thing is a pretty weak link to bond members of a community together. Communities are stronger when they share not just views but experiences. People who share a political view come together at rallies. Football fans bond when they cheer on their team together. Campaigners make friends at demonstrations and marches. The shared bonding experiences are the types of connection we want to encourage in ourselves and others.

For online communities, the issues are deeper and harder to understand and identify.

Online, the community members take part in group activities alone. They read and comment on posts in their own time and in isolation. The individuals don’t get to meet, let alone interact with other community members to share an experience.

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Live video has changed the online experience.

Now available on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and a host of other platforms is live video that ensures members of a community can share the same experience at the same time.

The “group and fan-base” might be sitting in different places, but they’re all looking at the same event simultaneously. The viewers can even interact with the broadcaster and with each other. It’s the closest that an online community comes to sharing a common experience.

There are lots of different ways for communities to make use of these live videos, but three options stand out the best.

Interview an Expert

One great connection is a live interview with an expert. Your live interview is like running a talk show — and there are even tools that allow you to interview someone in a different location. The organizer of a community for people who like Harry Potter, for example, could interview the author of popular Harry Potter fanfiction. As audience members watch, they can use the comment stream to ask questions and talk to each other.

The chat shows up on the right side of the live streaming — everyone sees it and can make comments. The live stream then becomes more than an interview. Right there in real-time, the interview turns into a live discussion that’s closer to a book reading than a television show. Because the interview with an expert is interactive — it’s even more valued as a personal shared experience.

Instructional Videos

Interviews require a little preparation. You have to find someone willing to talk and answer questions and arrange a time that suits you, them, and your audience. Finding a bookable timeframe is not a big challenge, but it will require collaboration. Hop on a good Calendar site and coordinate with everyone for a higher participation rate.

Live instructional videos don’t require the co-operation of others, though they will demand some thought. You’ll need to plan what you’re going to show, and have the ability to walk people through the steps of what you are saying without getting confused or losing your place.

The result, though, will be the sharing of information with people who value that information. Triangle Nursery, for example, is a flower and event business in the UK. The company broadcasts regular live videos that show people, keen on flower arrangements, how to make cool bouquets.

You can see from the comments in the videos how well the comments are received, and how classy the interviewers respond. The vid shows how to conduct a great forum for live interaction. The National Quilters Circle does something similar, bringing together hobbyists to learn and interact with each online.

Live Events

The third kind of live video is probably the most popular. One of the most common broadcasts on Facebook Live comes from churches that use the feature to bring congregations to their places of worship.

But a church certainly isn’t the only event that community organizers can use to cement relationships between members of an online community. Even industry events, such as car shows, can use live broadcasts to show people who can’t attend what they’re missing and let them communicate with the people who are there.

I’ve seen significant use of live vid for business teammate connections. There have been some great book groups on Facebook and elsewhere for individuals with all kinds of differing tastes from Business and Self-Help to Sci-Fi. Find one that fits what you are looking for. At this time of the COVID-19 issues — many teachers and schools are using this same live-stream format or instructional videos to stay in touch with their students.

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Firms as big as Apple have been live-streaming their events for years but live video takes that reach even further by enabling interaction. The organizer of an art fair, for example, can alert members of an art community that they’ll be broadcasting from the event live.

During the show, the organizers can walk the booths and interview the exhibitors. Inviting viewers to ask questions as they watch the walk-through is the icing on the cake. Exhibitors themselves could broadcast their own videos.

Art Sherpa, who teaches acrylic painting, teamed up with Pix Brix at the New York Toy Fair to talk about the company’s new construction toys. You can see how the live audience interaction adds a new degree of depth to what would otherwise be a typical marketing pitch.

Online communities have always had weaker bonds than real-life communities. Live video has helped to make those bonds much stronger.

The post How to Build Your Community with Live Video appeared first on ReadWrite.

Clinton Donnelly has a horror story that could keep many crypto investors awake at night.

The CPA, who specializes in calculating taxes on crypto profits, had a client who came to him after being arrested by the IRS. The client wasn’t a crypto trader. He hadn’t collected NFTs or bought and sold dogecoins. He’d just transacted with someone who’d paid him a lot of money in Bitcoin.

The payer had mined the Bitcoin himself and sent it to the client’s private wallet. The funds had never touched a public exchange but the client didn’t declare the revenue. He then used the Bitcoin to buy services over-the-counter.

“One day, two guys from the IRS showed up at his doorstep,” Donnelly told The Bad Crypto Podcast. “These are the guys with the guns and the badges.”

The IRS agents invited Donnelly’s future client to the tax office, which he attended with a couple of lawyers. The agents told him they thought he hadn’t been reporting all his income. But the man’s Bitcoins were in a private wallet. They weren’t on an exchange from which they could demand information or in a bank that has to follow Know Your Customer rules. And they hadn’t come from an exchange that could create a paper trail. Surely, there was no way the IRS could know that he’d received funds.

Over the next six months, the IRS investigated. There was no news. He thought nothing had happened. He worried, but the IRS wasn’t saying anything.

Until one day, he received a phone call from a US District Attorney informing him that he was about to receive a subpoena for tax fraud. The penalty would be $250,000 plus three years in prison for every year of infraction.

So how did the IRS know that Donnelly’s client had received crypto funds that he hadn’t declared but which had never touched a public exchange and were stored in a private wallet?

The IRS had dusted the wallet with satoshis. They’d sent a bunch of low-value satoshis to his wallet address and every time the client paid for something using his undeclared Bitcoin, the IRS was able to track the movement of those satoshis.

They were able to prove he’d received a significant amount of income—more than $10,000—which he hadn’t reported on his tax return.

“When he got the call from the District Attorney and a copy of the indictment, he went and spoke to two very experienced criminal tax attorneys,” explained Connelly. “They both gave him the same advice: you’re dead.”

His best hope was a good plea bargain. He paid $240,000 in cash, filed all his past tax returns, including penalties and interest, and accepted one year in jail. He served around seven to eight months and came out a convicted felon.

It’s a horror story that could be coming to a crypto trader near you soon. Tax season is upon us and the IRS are flush with cash and overloaded with resources. And they’re looking for crypto investors who have been slack with their tax filings.

“Congress has weaponized the IRS to go after crypto owners,” said Donnelly.

The IRS Commissioner told Congress last year that it could bring in another trillion dollars on top of the more than four trillion dollars it currently raises if it had the means to improve enforcement. When Congress approved the Infrastructure Act, in addition to paying for tens of thousands of additional IRS agents, it also provided $46 billion specifically for tax enforcement on the owners of digital assets.

“Let me put $46 billion in context for you,” Donnelly said. “That’s three times the annual budget of the FBI.”

They’re going to have plenty of use for that money. Donnelly quoted surveys and data from the IRS that suggested from tens of millions of active crypto investors, roughly 80 percent were not reporting their crypto income on their tax returns. They were either filing a tax return but not reporting their crypto profits or they weren’t filing a tax return at all.

“The IRS knows this,” warned Donnelly. “They know who all the crypto investors are. They can get the information from all the US exchanges.”

But filing crypto taxes isn’t easy. Companies offer gain calculation services to help investors measure their profits but when both the value of an asset and the value of the coin that measures that asset are volatile, results can very widely from service to service.

“I have a company of over twenty employees and half of them are crypto analysts,” said Donnelly. “What we’re finding is that there’s a lot that these services are not telling you.”

Even the best services come up with answers that are too high for NFT pricing, he explained. His own company at at cryptotaxaudit.com uses a service that does appraisal values on NFTs that come in at a quarter of major crypto gain calculation services. “These are defendable prices,” he added.

What the IRS are really interested in is fair market value in US dollars at the time of the transactions, whether that’s a loss or a profit.

Donnelly’s one word of advice is not to report on your tax return any crypto income amount that you don’t believe is correct, whether it’s too low or too high.

“If you do report something and it’s in the range that you believe that you generally made in terms of realized gain then you can sleep well knowing that you’re gonna pay a fair amount of tax on a gain number that you believe in.”
And at least you’ll be able to sleep.

The post How to Beat the Crypto Tax Crisis appeared first on ReadWrite.

Imagine a world where your most fantastical visions and creative ideas could be realized visually in less than sixty seconds. — like an airship floating through a technopunk landscape. An image for a print ad complete with smiling models holding up your product. Or a selection of new logos for your business ready to stamp onto your letterhead. Just type the words into your computer, and before the minute has passed, you’ll have a string of images that you can refine and tweak until they’re perfect for use.

And you can even do it for free.

That’s what AI can already offer, and it’s what Midjourney, one AI tool, makes so easy. It even makes the process fun.

BAD AI Show Tells You the How To’s

In a recent episode of the BAD AI Show, Travis Wright and I took viewers through the process of creating incredible AI images from scratch.

Midjourney is currently in beta, but with nearly 15 million members, it’s a pretty big beta. The more people try it out, the faster the algorithm will learn, so the company is keen to bring people on board to type in their prompts.

The program works through a bot on Discord, a social messaging app, so if you don’t have a Discord account already, you’ll need to sign up. You then have to give the Midjourney bot permission to access your Discord account.

It’s worth noting at this point that until you dip into your pocket for Midjourney’s premium services, your interaction with the bot will take place in a group chat.

You’re part of many people talking to the bot in public. You’ll be able to see other users’ prompts and images, and the images you generate will be available for others to see too. Click the Community Showcase on the top left for a gallery of recently generated pictures. Place the cursor over those pictures, and you’ll be able to see the prompts that generated them.

Prompts are the commands that tell the bot what you want to produce.

The more precise your prompts, the more control you’ll have over the image the algorithm produces. Ask simply for an image of a Japanese tree, for example, and Midjourney could give you a woodblock print of a ginkgo tree in front of a temple.

Or the bot could produce a stylized bonsai tree floating in a soap bubble. The result is random and differs every time Add details about the angle of the view, the style of the picture, or the quality of the image, and the algorithm will start to throw in more influences that affect the outcome.

One way to add those details is to examine the prompts used by other members of the community. Terms that turn up frequently include “4k,” “photorealism,” “line art,” and “inspired by,” with the name of a known artist pushing the algorithm to work in a particular style.

You can also combine different AI tools for MidJourney

On the podcast, I explained that I was recently listening to Simon and Garfunkel singing 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover. I asked ChatGPT to come up with a list of 50 ways, then fed some of those ways into Midjourney, asking the bot to make me an image of a man breaking up with his girlfriend.

But there’s no limit to the concepts you can throw into Midjourney, and combining ideas can often produce some fun results. It’s how creativity works: a meeting between two apparently unrelated ideas that generates something entirely new.

Here’s How to Start Entering Your Prompts

To start entering your prompts, select one of the Newcomer Rooms on the left. In the field at the bottom of the page, type “/imagine,” followed by the prompt.

Once you’ve entered the prompts, Midjourney will draw on the millions of images the algorithm has analyzed to produce four unique options within sixty seconds.

You’ll then be able to refine those images in three ways.

Beneath the pictures, rows of numbered buttons let you upscale each of the images or generate four new variations of the image you’ve selected. For example, you could ask the bot to stick with the picture but add more shade or change the background.

If you don’t like any of the results, then a button with a couple of arrows provides a way to generate a new set of pictures.

Remember that while Midjourney is a talented artist, it’s not much of a writer.

Letters become mangled, and words become indecipherable. You’ll need to add any text yourself in post-production. Once you’re happy, you can right-click the image you want, save it, and put it to use.

Midjourney and Copyright Law

Images made by Midjourney are not covered by copyright, so you’re free to use them however you wish. But that lack of copyright protection also means anyone can use them. In February this year, the US Copyright Office wrote to Kristina Kashtanova to partially rescind copyright protection for her comic Zarya of the Dawn. Although the text and arrangement of the images are protectable, the copyright office said the images “generated by Midjourney contained within the Work are not original works of authorship protected by copyright.”

It’s the same principle that applies to other works not created by humans, such as a selfie taken by a monkey or the daubs of an elephant on a canvas. There are no humans in the Midjourney process, so copyright law doesn’t apply.

You’ll Create Your MidJourney Journey With Delight

Use Midjourney to create images for use in a work of art, and anyone will be able to take those images and use them too.

On the other hand, if you use copyrighted assets to create your images, you could still run into trouble. Ask Midjourney to produce a picture of Superman using your company’s product, for example, and you’re likely to get a letter from DC’s lawyers if you use that image in an ad.

Experimenting with Midjourney is free, but premium plans starting at just $8 a month will increase the number of images you can produce each month, give you preference when the API is busy, and let you generate your fantastical visions in private.

Featured Image Credit: Photo by Alexander Ant; Pexels; Thank you!

The post MidJourney Tutorial for Beginners appeared first on ReadWrite.

Social media was supposed to be the ultimate free speech platform, a place where the world would come together to swap information and share opinions. It would be the battleground of ideas. Someone would say something that looked sensible, face a challenge from someone with a different experience, and new facts, and the world would move forward with smarter and better thoughts. But the question is: has social media had its day?

Social Media hasn’t quite worked out the way we thought it would.

Twitter has become a playground for bots and trolls. Facebook is filled with misinformation, a place where foreign governments can set up groups to spread fake news.

Saying something that isn’t in vogue won’t prompt someone else to say: “Huh, I never thought of it that way.” It’s more likely to produce a giant virtual pile-on that results in boycotts and ostracism. Who knew we were closed-minded? Who knew that no new opinioned could be offered or tried? –Zero– and

The platforms themselves have struggled to cope, blocking some opinions and taking flak from one side or the other.

At the same time, users have retreated into their own bubbles.

Instead of coming to Facebook or Twitter to learn something new and obtain a fresh viewpoint, we listen to people who agree with our preconceptions, and misconceptions and who reinforce our prejudices.

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Knowing we CAN’T STAND anything new — we GET nothing new.

Algorithms feed us more of the same. The constant reminders of why we’re right — seem to be satisfying to us. But always thinking the same way is not very educated — and having the same thoughts day in and day out won’t ever help to break down barriers or improve understanding.

Breaking down barriers was one of the big benefits that social media was supposed to deliver.

Sure, we can still keep in touch with old friends on Facebook and we can see what everyone is eating for breakfast on Instagram, but as information platforms, social media just isn’t working.

You think you are against censorship — well, you’re not — and you’ve proved it.

Brands have noticed that you want the same thing, too. According to one study, 2019 saw a fall in social media engagement of around 50 percent across a range of industries. People are turning off. We might still open an app and flick through a timeline but we’re less likely to stop and comment or like. Why? Because it’s the same old thing.

So what happens next? If social media has plateaued, what’s likely to replace it?

One clue lies in the rise of TikTok. A platform developed in China and subject, at least in part, to Chinese government censorship.

Censorship might not look like the answer to social media’s free speech problem, but it avoids the issue altogether. It’s what we’ve all been forcing on Social Media. Don’t have any free-thinking thoughts. Don’t say anything that might break down barriers and build understanding.

The content on the TikTok site is generally made up of young people dancing and lip-syncing.

Oh goodie! No sharing of dangerous views here where you’d be challenged. There’s just a sharing of fun and quirky clips that people want to watch and enjoy.

Social networking as a whole might be under pressure but the media side of social media—the home-made videos spread between friends—that’s still working fine, and it’s likely to continue.

One way Social Media sharing will continue is in increased use of live video.

In 2018, about one in four Americans listened to at least one podcast every month. In 2019, that number had risen to one in three. But podcasting is only audio and it only works in one direction.

Podcasters broadcast; listeners listen. Live video is also visual, and it’s interactive.

Viewers watch and listen, and they can also ask questions and engage with the speakers. Video might not be something you can use while jogging or driving to work, but it’s a lot more engaging than cable TV.

As brands find that their posts and pictures are ignored, expect more companies to turn to live engagement.

And as users find that they’re getting less back for the data they give, they’ll also be less willing to hand over that data. Why should they tell Facebook what they like, and who they are, and where they live, when Facebook won’t let them say what they think?

Why give your data and information when it gives everyone a way to abuse you and gives a bash-fest-opening? How long will there be free-speech and free-thinking? …Not long.

We’re already seeing a pushback against data collection by nosy Web browsers.

If that giant pushback succeeds, it won’t be long before we start to see rival social media platforms that promise equal levels of privacy — even if it can’t deliver free-speech

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These are strange times for social media.

On the one hand, the industry has succeeded and grown faster than just about any industry before it. On the other hand, despite being little more than two decades old, it’s already showing its cracks.

A fantastic tool that has allowed so many people to talk to each other, entertain each other, and exchange news isn’t going to disappear. But its challenging environment and information bubble will mean that it’s about to evolve in a whole new direction.

But, will we like it?

The post Social Media has had its Day appeared first on ReadWrite.

When holders of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs turned up at their exclusive “warehouse” party in New York last December, they might have been disappointed. Comedian Aziz Ansari introduced Beck on stage. Chris Rock cracked some jokes before giving way to The Strokes. Drinks were free, and the place was packed with wealthy young people up to date on the latest fashion. All decent benefits for owners of digital images are typically worth six figures each.

But the stars of the night didn’t turn up. No bored apes propped their elbows on the bar and complained about life on ships.

That’s a small complaint, but it says a great deal about one of the challenges of NFTs. The collections depend on items that may or may not have broad appeal. So either you get the irony of rich, dilettante cartoon primates in strange clothes or the greatness of colorful, pixel-block punks, or the whole NFT thing just flies over your head.

For many people, the joke flies over their heads.

But strange cartoon characters aren’t the only kinds of NFTs, and some collections have come with a fan base attached. Both William Shatner and the family of Leonard Nimoy, for example, have turned some of their private photographs into NFT collections, allowing Star Trek fans to own some star memorabilia.

A new collection from Sylvester Stallone is now bridging the gap between celebrity branding and the kinds of collections that center on cartoon characters.

The SLYGuys are a set of 9,997 NFTs featuring Rocky and Rambo film superstar Sylvester Stallone. Collectors can own NFTs of the movie star in a range of different costumes with more than 250 unique traits. The NFTs consist of artworks drawn by Clark Mitchell, an artist whose works have been used by Marvel, Hasbro, and Disney.

Stallone himself will digitally sign and number twenty-five of the rarest items in the collection.

Like other NFT collections, owners will be able to resell their tokens on secondary markets, so rare combinations of appealing traits should generate higher prices. The tokens will launch on the Ethereum blockchain and can be bought and sold on OpenSea.

Where SLYGuys becomes really interesting, though, is the point at which the collection meets the real world. Owners of Bored Apes are able to feel that they’re members of an exclusive club. They spotted the potential of NFTs early. They own expensive artworks. And they get to attend star-studded parties.

Owners of SLYGuys NFTs will be able to attend a Stallone experience, dinner, and after-party with the actor himself. The event will take place in Florida some time in 2022 and will be available only to people who own three of the tokens.

It’s a move that brings new functionality to the world of NFTs. These aren’t just pretty images stored in a digital wallet. They are membership cards to an exclusive club focused on a celebrity brand. The experience they promise extends beyond the pride of ownership and extends to meeting and partying with like-minded people.

And when owners of SLYGuys attend the event to which their NFTs grant access, they can actually feel confident that the star will turn up.

Image Credit: Provided by the Author; Thank you!

The post Sylvester Stallone Scores a Knockout with NFTs appeared first on ReadWrite.

From Mark Zuckerberg stating that Facebook will become a metaverse company to Satya Nadella saying that one of the goals for Microsoft is the metaverse, you can’t read business news today without coming across the word du jour.

While the metaverse is still being defined and developed, several key figures have become leading voices helping evangelize, educate, advise, develop and create the successor to today’s mobile internet. Here are 30 of the most influential people who can help us all have a better perspective of what the metaverse is and will become.

1. Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson is one of the world’s leading sci-fi writers. Stephenson is recognized as the first author who mentioned the term Metaverse in his post-cyberpunk novel “Snow Crash” in 1992. Stephenson’s work explores Mathematics, Cryptography, Linguistics, Philosophy, Currency, and Science History. He worked at Blue Origin, a company founded by Jeff Bezos as an advisor. Also, he worked at Magic Leap as Chief Futurist from 2014 to 2020.

2. Matthew Ball

Matthew Ball is a well-known strategist, essayist, investor, advisor, and futurist. Ball is the Managing Partner of EpyllionCo, a company that operates a pre-seed and seed venture fund and a venture and corporate advisory arm. Along with Genvid Technologies CEO Jacob Navok and Roundhill Investments, Ball has launched The Roundhill Ball Metaverse ETF. The ETF allows people to invest in companies making the metaverse happen now or are situated to do so in the future.

3. Cathy Hackl

Cathy Hackl is a globally recognized tech futurist and business executive with deep experience working in metaverse-related fields with companies like HTC VIVE, Magic Leap, and Amazon Web Services. She’s the founder of the Futures Intelligence Group where she advises Fortune 1000 and top luxury fashion brands on metaverse growth strategies, NFTs, and how to extend their brands into virtual worlds. She’s a sought-after consultant, speaker, and media personality. Hackl was recently featured in 60 Minutes+, Bloomberg and Cheddar’s coverage of the metaverse and is a contributor to Forbes. She’s writing an anticipated book on the business opportunities of the metaverse that will be published by Bloomsbury Publishing.

4. David Baszucki

As the Founder and CEO of Roblox, David Baszucki has been working on bringing the gaming industry into the Metaverse for years. He founded Roblox in 2004 with the vision of connecting the world. Roblox currently has an estimated amount of 20.82 million total subscribed players and around 400k daily players entering the platform. Roblox is now collaborating with known brands such as Gucci to create immersive experiences with gaming. Roblox recently launched a podcast called “Roblox Tech Talks” with its first episode, “Step Into The Metaverse,” a discussion between Baszucki and Roblox’s CTO Dan Sturman.

5. Tim Sweeney

Tim Sweeney is the founder and CEO of Epic Games, the maker of one of the world’s most popular games called Fortnite. Sweeney is also the creator of the gaming platform known as Unreal Engine. He has received various awards recognizing his work in the gaming industry, including “Person of the year” in 2019 by the British video game industry magazine MCV. Also, in 2020 Forbes Media Awards chose Sweeney as “Person of the Year” for building and turning Fortnite into a gaming social network that hosts online events such as Travis Scott’s in-game concert with 28 million viewers. On August 6, 2021, Fortnite collaborated with Ariana Grande to host the “Rift Tour” concert gameplay.

6. Jensen Huang

Jensen Huang is the CEO of NVIDIA Corporation. He founded NVIDIA to solve the problem of 3D graphics for the PC. Then Nvidia jumped to the next era of computing: Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Huang contacted the Metaverse creating NVIDIA’s Omniverse, which is now available in beta version. NVIDIA Omniverse is an open, cloud-native platform that makes it easy to accelerate workflows and collaborate in real-time. Omniverse allows creators, engineers, and researchers to collaborate in virtual worlds that are all connected.

7. Philip Rosedale

Philip Rosedale is a lifelong entrepreneur aiming for an open-ended, Internet-connected virtual world. He pioneered the creation of Second Life, a virtual civilization. In 2013, he co-founded High Fidelity, Inc. with its Spatial Audio API that enables immersive, high-quality voice chat for any application for any group size in a personalized 3D audio stream.

8. Beeple

Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, made history in March 2021 where he sold his NFT collage everyday series called “Everydays: the First 5000 Days” for $69,400,00 at Christie’s auction house, making it the fourth-most expensive artwork by a living artist. Christie’s described Beeple as “A visionary digital artist at the forefront of NFTs.”

9. Avery Akkineni

Gary Vaynerchuk is a force in the NFT world, and he’s chosen Avery Akkineni to lead his team as President of VaynerNFT. Akkineni believes that NFTs can simultaneously build brand value while delivering community value. VaynerNFT is a venture created to help the world’s leading intellectual property owners navigate the NFT space. Currently, Budweiser signed as VaynerNFT’s flagship client to generate a PR strategy to grow excitement and connect with consumers through ingenious experiences.

10. Lindsey McInerney

Lindsey McInerney is the Global Head of Technology and Innovation at Anheuser-Busch InBev. She led the collaboration between Stella Artois and the virtual horse racing platform ZED RUN to give users exclusive horse breed NFTs. She has deep working knowledge of the global software industry, with direct experience working in North America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, and the Asia Pacific. Her specialties are the Metaverse, crypto, blockchain, NFTs, commercial strategy, and digital marketing.

11. Krista Kim

Krista Kim is a contemporary artist and the founder of Techism. Techism is an art movement that reconciles technological innovation with the creation of art. Kim has exhibited on the iconic square of the Palais of Tokyo Museum and the Museum of Modern Art of Paris. Currently, she is the ambassador of SuperWorld, an augmented reality virtual world that allows users and brands to create, discover, and monetize.

12. Jamie Burke

Jamie Burke is the Founder and CEO Outlier Ventures, one of the top venture funds in Europe and a platform dedicated to blockchain technology and Web 3. Outlier Ventures has developed an award-winning Web 3 accelerator working with 30 pre-seed startups during a year, helping raise over $130 million in growth capital. In February 2021, Outlier Ventures launched The Open Metaverse OS, a shared and open operating system of sorts building upon the success of decentralized protocols, in particular DeFi and NFTs emerging in The Web 3 Stack based on blockchains and crypto-assets.

13. Ryan Gill

Ryan Gill is the co-founder and CEO of Crucible, which seeks to create the Blueprints for the Open Metaverse, a cross-industry consortium for forging the Open Metaverse based on open standards. Crucible’s main product is the Emergence SDK which provides an accessible vehicle for game engine developers to access new Web 3 technologies with portable digital identity and in-world tools to manage their digital lives across the Open Metaverse. His company is the originator of the Direct-to-Avatar (D2A) commerce model. Crucible is creating a market network of empowered gamers, modders, and creators for the new digital renaissance that will come in a few short years by those building the future through game engines.

14. Marjorie Hernandez

Marjorie Hernandez is the co-founder of LUKSO which she co-founded with her partner Fabian Vogelsteller. LUKSO is a blockchain platform specifically curated for the lifestyle industry, providing decentralized innovation and trust infrastructure for fashion brands, startups, and customers.

Hernandez also co-founded THE DEMATERIALISED with educator and connector Karinna Nobbs. THE DEMATERIALISED is a virtual goods marketplace, generating new experiences and revenue streams for the fashion industry.

15. Akash Nigam

Akash Nigam is the founder of Genies, an avatar-building platform where people can speak their minds and find connections. Nigam entered the Metaverse world with a mindset of how creating avatars can help people dealing with their mental health and find a space where they can truly be themselves. In May 2021, Genies raised $65 million led by Mary Meeker’s investment firm Bond, intending to use the funds to develop Genies’ NFT Marketplace, allowing users to produce and trade tokenized avatars, clothing, and accessories.

16. Benoit Pagotto

Benoit Pagotto is the co-founder of RTFKT studios, a studio for next-generation sneakers, fashion and collectibles for the Metaverse. RTKFT merges augmented reality, NFTs, blockchain authentication with gaming and fashion. Pagotto believes that brands need to redirect their marketing to Gen Z. In May 2021, RTFKT studios raised $8 million in seed funding by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz to expand the company’s global team and incubate new digital projects.

17. Sebastien Borget

Sebastien Borget has been working in blockchain technology and within the mobile gaming industries for a while, and is the co-founder and COO of The Sandbox. The Sandbox is a virtual world where players can build, own, and monetize their own voxel gaming experiences on the PoS blockchain platform, which reduces the carbon footprint of NFTs by up to 99%. Currently, Animoca Brands and Skybound Entertainment teamed up to bring The Walking Dead to The Sandbox.

18. Andrew Bosworth

Andrew “Boz” Bosworth is the Vice President of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality at Facebook, Bosworth is an essential piece in Facebook’s new step to the Metaverse because of his role at Facebook Reality Labs.

Bosworth announced the launch of a metaverse product team at Facebook in a post a week after Mark Zuckerberg said publicly that Facebook would become a metaverse company. Boz also has a podcast called Boz To The Future where he interviews leaders within Facebook about the company’s roadmap.

19. Carolina Arguelles

Carolina Arguelles is Snap’s Group Product Marketing Manager where she leads a team for Snap’s augmented reality, visual search, computer vision technologies, augmented reality creator ecosystem, business augmented reality offerings, and camera developers SDKs. Her vision of how 5G will change augmented reality and fashion has brought interesting projects to Snap Inc’s Snapchat by working with renowned fashion brands like Ralph Lauren or Dior.

20. Emma-Jane Mackinnon-Lee

Emma-Jane Mackninnon-Lee is the Founder and CEO of DIGITALAX. This Web 3.0 digital platform builds the first digital fashion operating system that optimizes web architecture to bring fashion, gaming, modding, NFTs, DeFi, DAOs, virtual reality, and other 3D content environments. Digitalax launched Diggyfizzy, a metaverse magazine, to highlight new creators and new voices in the NFT industry. Digitalax’s next project is the Web3 Fashion Week in collaboration with Web3 Fashion.

21. Dirk Lueth

Dirk Lueth, a serial entrepreneur who started companies in Europe and the United States, is the co-founder of Upland. Upland is an NFT Metaverse and property trading game paired with a decentralized economy. It consists of a world-building platform in the Metaverse based on blockchain technology where users can buy, sell, trade, and develop virtual properties to earn money and connect with others.

22. Evelyn Mora

Evelyn Mora is the inventor of the Village Protocol Social Blockchain User Interface (UI). She founded the DIGITAL VILLAGE, a Social Metaverse with its community-led Blockchain technology built to prioritize social and digital sustainability, digital land, and digital assets marketplace.

23. Teddy Pahagbia

Teddy Pahagbia is the founder of BLVCK PiXEL. BLVCK PiXEL is a company that helps brands and businesses to transform through digital innovation like augmented, virtual, and mixed reality, blockchains, artificial intelligence, and advanced data management systems. BLVCK PiXEL’s vision is to achieve business growth on the scope of technology immersed with a human-centered approach for purpose-driven innovation.

24. Jon Radoff

Jon Radoff is the CEO of Beamable, Radoff aims to integrate social networking, content creation, online communities, and games. In May 2021, Beamable had a $5 Million raise intended to continue being a creator-focused platform for building live games, eliminating all barriers to help game makers increase their revenues at a low operation cost.

25. Amber Allen

Amber Allen is the founder of Double A Labs, a company that offers from tech-forward immersive augmented and mixed reality experiences to spatial computing, photogrammetry to holograms, and projection mapping. Double A Labs creates virtual experiences through their Phygital World for brands’ consumers to watch, create, play, and shop, bringing brands’ content into dynamic worlds, living unique and engaging experiences. Double A Labs have done projects for known clients, including AT&T, Twitch, and Dell.

26. DCL Blogger

A few years back, Matty, better known as, DCL Blogger, stumbled upon Decentraland, a virtual world-building platform. He saw the benefits of a community that was actively buying and selling NFTs for money, so he decided to create a full-time thing to earn money. As a result, he decided to create DCL Blogger to keep a log of his thoughts and learnings about Decentraland and NFTs. DCL Blogger is the founder of the Metakey, a token that can be used across multiple platforms to transform into avatars, game items, course material, virtual lands, and much more.

27. Evo Heyning

Evo Heyning is a system designer who focuses on spatial interfaces, engagement strategy, artificial intelligence, and mixed reality in workflows and networks that enable collaboration. She founded Light Lodges, an interactive and immersive media agency and studio producing mixed reality and virtual reality experiences and channels. Also, she is the Executive Producer and CEO of PlayableAgency, a company that creates immersive and interactive experiences with playable cities and venues. Since June 2021, Heyning is the Co-Chair of the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group, a Metaverse media network that is open and public for communities in the development of new worlds.

28. Erikan Obotetukudo

Erikan Obotetukudo is a strategic advisor to a portfolio of finance leaders, corporate executives, investors, and tech entrepreneurs. She’s working to connect with multicultural and multigenerational audiences worldwide, redefining it in the next 100 years. In March 2021, she founded Audacity, a crypto Venture Capital fund that invests in Black and African-led crypto startups worldwide.

29. Hrish Lotlikar

Hrish Lotlikar is the co-founder and CEO of SuperWorld, a virtual world in augmented reality (AR) mapped onto the real world, allowing users to create, discover, and monetize content in Augmented Reality. He is also co-founder and Chief Business Development Officer at Rogue Initiative Studios, an LA-based entertainment company. His interests are Film, TV, virtual reality, gaming, mixed reality (XR), and crypto.

30. Enara Nazarova

Enara Nazarova is the founder of ARMOAR and The Digital Fashion & Art Club. She also co-hosts digital fashion and art on Clubhouse. Nazarova fused all her metaverse knowledge into ARMOAR, a digital fashion platform and identity incubator for avatars.

Her mission at ARMOAR is to blend organic and inorganic worlds to create a sustainable digital ecosystem for artists and their fans to explore the future of virtual identity.

Image Credits: from the author; thank you!

The post The Top 30 Most Influential People in The Metaverse appeared first on ReadWrite.

PewDiePie is coming back to YouTube. The Swedish video star, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, was once the platform’s biggest creator. He left in 2019, taking his live videos to rival upstart DLive. Here is why PewDiePie sees new opportunities in live video’s new features.

PewDiePie has had a volatile relationship with Google’s video property.

Accusations of anti-Semitism and racism in his video content led to an advertiser backlash, prompting YouTube to temporarily remove ads from his channel. Dlive, a blockchain-powered video site, had promised him a fairer payment system and higher rewards.

So what brought him back? Why would one of the world’s biggest influencers leave a platform that now gives him complete freedom and a full 75 percent revenue-share? Why would he go back exclusively to a site that’s shown a willingness to exert control and even cut off ad revenues if it doesn’t like his jokes?

The simple answer is likely to be that YouTube will give him more money.

On Dlive, PewDiePie had attracted 822,000 followers. On YouTube, his account had more than 102 million subscribers. Even with a higher revenue share, PewDiePie would have been earning much less on the blockchain site than he could make on YouTube.

But money wasn’t the reason that PewDiePie cited. Instead, he argued that both he and YouTube were putting more investments in live streaming. “Live-streaming is something I’m focusing a lot on in 2020 and beyond,” he said, “so to be able to partner with YouTube and be at the forefront of new product features is special and exciting for the future.”

Live streaming offers a number of benefits that aren’t available to recorded video.

Live streaming has an urgency — a live video is only live once. It’s interactive: viewers can ask questions and make comments that the broadcaster can answer during the stream. And it’s a format that platforms like Netflix and Hulu just can’t offer. Brands, even personal brands like PewDiePie, can use live streaming to attract an engaged audience and interact with it in real-time.

YouTube is now in the process of rolling out new features that will help live video streamers.

Content creators can separate audience figures, allowing them to see how many people watched a video live and how many saw it after the recording was uploaded. Smart replies, like suggested responses in Gmail, let broadcasters shoot back thanks to compliments in the comment stream while they broadcast.

The Live Control Room, which launched officially late last year, makes it easy for streamers to create highlight reels and track viewer activity.

All of those features are useful but when it comes to live video, YouTube isn’t the only game in town, and even those new features won’t give it an edge.

Viewers are more accustomed to interacting with others on social media platforms than they are on a video platform like YouTube.

Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Facebook has seen a 50 percent increase in live video audiences as people stuck at home look for real-time interaction. The company will soon let people watch live videos without a Facebook account. The options will include automatic closed captioning and digital tipping, and provide toll-free phone numbers for charity streams.

There’s more in Live Video!

Other companies have gone even further — to everyone’s delight. Be.Live, a third-party provider, lets streamers on both Facebook and YouTube brand their broadcasts. You can highlight comments and questions on the screen, and even promote specific products. Think: complete with pictures, description, and price — and you have a general idea.

Live streaming has always had a value that recorded video just can’t match.

No other format lets audiences interact with broadcasters in real-time, ask questions, influence content, and engage with creators. At a time when live concerts are out of bounds, live videos are the closest audiences can currently get to a real-time event.

It’s no wonder that both YouTube and Facebook are investing in this format — and it’s no wonder that PewDiePie is looking for the platform that will give him the biggest live audience.

The post Why PewDiePie Sees New Opportunities in Live Video’s New Features appeared first on ReadWrite.

We all want to be right. We all want to feel that we’re smart and rational, that we’ve weighed the evidence and come to the best decision possible. When we’re proven right, we want to be able to say “I told you so!”—because there are few feelings more powerful than that.

But here’s the thing: being right is easy.

When Bitcoin touched $20,000 at the end of 2017, it felt as though every expert in the world was dismissing the cryptocurrency as a bubble. The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly all ran opinion pieces explaining why the hype wouldn’t last and why anyone who bought now would lose their shirts.

At the moment it looks like they were right.

Bitcoin sank dramatically from that peak. It hasn’t come close to returning since. John McAfee’s prediction that Bitcoin would reach a million bucks by the end of 2020 is starting to look very wrong indeed. (And he’s got a lot to lose.)

You’d think that someone as smart as John McAfee would know better. But he’s not alone in making gambles that he’s likely to regret.

When Mark Zuckerberg paid $2 billion for Oculus Rift in 2014, Wired dismissed the purchase as a “bet too far.” People had been talking about the arrival of virtual reality for thirty years, the magazine noted and compared it to the development of 3D movies. It doesn’t matter how much technology improves, no one wants it.

Again and again, we’ve been told that self-driving cars would be here in 2020. Again and again, those predictions—and the billions invested by just about every car manufacturer in the world now—have been proven wrong. Working jetpacks sometimes feel closer than self-driving cars.

Everyone who believed that we would now be paying online with Bitcoin, living in a world of virtual reality, and doing it all while the robot cars we drive us down the highway has been proven to be wrong. Everyone who said it wouldn’t happen has got to say “I told you so.”

But it’s not just Bitcoin that the crypto-critics rejected.

They also rejected the whole concept of the blockchain. And it wasn’t just Oculus Rift that people said Zuckerberg had got wrong. The first mention of Facebook in The New York Times includes a quote from a student wondering about its value. “Before I got here it was a way to get to know people,” says the student. “But once you’re here it sort of loses its purpose. Why not just talk to them and get to know them?”

Companies as large as American Express are now building financial infrastructure using blockchain technology.

Self-driving cars might not be here now, but buy a new car with Lane-Keeping Assistance and you’ll feel the steering wheel move before you do. It’s getting closer. As for Zuckerberg, he’s pretty happy saying to people who told him he was wrong to drop out of Harvard: “I told you so.”

It’s easy to be cynical.

It’s easy to dismiss new ideas and ignore new product launches… and most of the time you’ll be right because most of the time, those ideas don’t work and those products won’t take off. Most don’t.

Anyone can shake their head and say: “That won’t work.” And usually, they’ll be able to say “I told you so.”

The value of forward-thinking isn’t to spot which ideas and which products are going to fail. That’s easy. The value comes from being willing to say “That will work,” and be prepared to be wrong. You have to prepared to let others say, “I told you so.”

Because when you’re not cynical, when you’re hopeful and optimistic, once in a while—maybe once in a lifetime—you’ll be right.

You’ll spot a winner before anyone else does. You’ll get in at the beginning. Everyone will forget all the times you were wrong and they’ll remember the one time you got it right. They’ll wonder how you did it. And you’ll be able to say: “You should have listened.”

The post What It Really Means to Be Forward-Thinking appeared first on ReadWrite.

One of the biggest advantages claimed for cryptocurrency is its security. The blockchain—the digital ledger that tracks the movement of every coin—can’t be hacked. Money can’t disappear from someone’s purse, never to be seen again. It’s possible to look at the records on the blockchain and see what happened to every coin from the moment it was mined to its current position. Here’s why cryptocurrency is still secure despite the hackers.

In theory, Bitcoin should be unstealable money. In practice, it hasn’t worked out that way.

As soon as digital currencies acquired a value, they attracted the attention of thieves. And those thieves were very clever and very effective. Robbing a bank usually means buying a balaclava and a gun, and risk being shot by a security guard. The theft of a digital coin can usually be performed in a thief’s bedroom using nothing more dangerous than a keyboard and an Internet connection.

But while the risk is low, the rewards can be huge. The 2014 robbery of Mt. Gox, then the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, was worth $460 million. In 2018, thieves took $500 million of NEM from CoinCheck.

The biggest physical bank robbery, which took place in Brazil in 2005, was worth “only” $69.8 million. In 2019 alone, criminals got away with $4.26 billion worth of digital coins, according to one report.

That might suggest that the security of cryptocurrencies is overstated and that you’re better off stashing your cash in a metal box under the bed.

But it’s not so simple.

None of the hacks have taken place on the blockchain itself.

A few hacks have been the result of attacks on individual phones but most of the robberies have taken place on exchanges. An exchange is where people store their coins before transferring them in a transaction or converting them to fiat.

As far as thieves are concerned, exchanges are where the money is.

A hacker who can break into an exchange’s system and access user keys can do anything he wants with other people’s funds. And while the money the thieves make off with can’t be forced back—a blockchain doesn’t usually allow transactions to be undone—the money can be tracked.

The digital ledger keeps a record of the movement of every coin. Anyone can see where their money went after it was stolen out of the exchange. An individual can’t see who owns the public key their funds are associated with — but they can see the key itself.

That means that while victims can’t take their money back — they can freeze it.

After CoinCheck was hacked, the exchange identified and published a list of eleven addresses that held all its stolen coins.

Each of those addresses now carries a tag that says:

“coincheck_stolen_funds_do_not_accept_trades : owner_of_this_account_is_hacker.”

Developers then created a tool that enabled exchanges to automatically reject those coins.

So while the value of the theft might have been half a billion dollars, those stolen coins are now just about worthless to the scummy-scurrvy-dirty-rotten-cheating-[asswipes] who are thieves. The original owners might not be able to get them back but the thieves can’t move them either. It’s as though a bank had placed a special dye in its banknotes that turned them black as soon as they were stolen.

These events have a couple of implications for users of cryptocurrencies.

• First, all of us should be aware that despite the hype about cryptosecurity, it is possible to be robbed, so they have to be cautious.
• Second, keep your private keys safe.
• Only store online the amounts needed to make transfers and perform transactions.
• Private keys to large funds should be kept in cold storage so that they can’t be hacked. But users shouldn’t fear the loss of their coins. Unlike theater-goers with bulging wallets and expensive jewelry, individuals aren’t usually the targets of digital muggers looking to steal digital money.
• The weak links in the cryptocurrency system are the exchanges, not the blockchain or individuals.
• Cryptocurrency users should only use exchanges that carry insurance. When Binance was robbed of $40 million earlier this year, the company announced a “large scale security breach.”
• No Binance customers suffered personal losses because the exchange was able to draw on its emergency insurance fund.

The existence of insurance funds will become an increasingly important draw for people choosing an exchange.

The purchased insurance costs The Exchange money. Because The Exchange is putting up money for insurance, it will force The Exchange to pay even more attention to its security. Exchanges are working to make their systems harder to hack. At the same time, as blockchains freeze wallets that hold stolen funds — the rewards for a successful hack will shrink.

Cryptocrime won’t go away but it will become less of a threat, making cryptocurrencies increasingly secure.

The post Why Cryptocurrency is Still Secure Despite the Hackers appeared first on ReadWrite.

Facebook started life as the place to go meet the people at your college. It then became the place to meet the people you used to know at college. Now it’s not quite clear what it’s for. User growth is continuing, but more slowly than in the past which means that everyone you want to stay in touch with is probably already in your contact list. Here is Facebook becoming less personal and more professional.

For Facebook, that’s meant a switch of emphasis. Instead of focusing on user growth, the company is prioritizing engagement. It wants to give users information that they find interesting and encourage them to react to that content.

So far, it’s worked. By figuring out what people want to see, monthly median engagement levels between January and mid-July this year increased significantly. In the US, average comments rose from six to eight. Likes increased from nine to thirteen, and ad clicks went up from thirteen to seventeen.

Much of that content though, isn’t coming from friends and family. And it’s not coming from news producers either. Facebook de-prioritized publisher content in 2018. Instead, it’s coming from Facebook Groups—and those groups are now more important than ever for marketers.

While brands have always struggled to push their messages into news feeds and compete for attention against posts from friends and family, groups have the benefit of offering multiple sources of related content in one place.

Brand pages rely entirely on the business behind them to create engaging content. They depend on the brand’s content creators to continuously pump out new posts and new messages. But groups are always active and their members are constantly contributing to discussions and raising new topics.

They function much like Internet forums but with the added benefit of being linked to a brand, or a brand’s activity. A sunglasses brand, for example, could create a group about its own brand and build a following of fans but it could also create a group for people who love classic sunglasses designs.

Making the most of those groups requires new marketing strategies. Brands have to act less like content publishers, and more like community leaders. They have to guide conversations and spark discussions rather than use the group to push their own content.

Their opinions will carry more weight than most members but they will still only be one voice among many in the group. And that voice has to be about a topic rather than a company. As Digiday has noted, Peloton has its own Facebook page but it also has a Peloton Rider group about cycling that links to that page.

One challenge, which is common throughout social media, will be to get people into the group initially. Facebook will expect brands to advertise for those first members, especially in related groups or by targeting the demographics of potential members.

But influencers can also help to drive new members into the group. The HBO show Little Big Lies used its cast to pull people into its official group which supports its Facebook page.

Brands can also skip the group-building by joining in the discussion on already existing groups. They have to be careful here though. Members won’t take kindly companies butting in with hard promotions but they will appreciate a brand asking their opinion about a topic they love or handing out discount codes provided that they’re working with the group’s admins.

None of this is straightforward. It’s a very different kind of marketing to the promotions we’ve seen on Facebook until now. Brands won’t be defining the conversation; they can only influence it.

Brands will be either organizing a kind of online party or they’ll be joining one that’s already in progress. But they should find that they give their marketing efforts on Facebook a whole new life.

The post Facebook is Becoming Less Personal and More Professional appeared first on ReadWrite.

Live video is a hugely powerful marketing tool. It combines visual imagery with a unique form of urgency, two-way communication, and an appearance on popular social media channels. But like any marketing tool, it shouldn’t stand alone. Live video has to be worked into an overall marketing strategy in which different elements support and reinforce each other to build trust and desire, and guide leads to the purchase.

Using live video for your marketing at your launch is crucial.

Brands that release their products with spectacular, eye-catching shows have long used live broadcasts to attract as large an audience as possible. Apple’s product launches fill the company’s own auditorium with journalists but also go out to people watching at home at the same time. When designers like Michael Kors release their new collections, they offer live video feeds from the catwalk.

Smaller brands might have less splashy launches but they can still use live video.

The live video will also support the products immediately afterward. Once the product is out and available, hold an AMA or a live product demonstration. You will already have trailed the launch and generated interest. The live video that follows the launch will give you an opportunity to show the product’s benefits and value instead of only describing them.

Later, you can follow up that product demo with more broadcasts that help customers make the most of the product. Beauty firms like Schwarzkopf, for example, have built large audiences with live tutorials.

One powerful marketing strategy is for a brand to associate itself with a campaign for a good cause.

Starbucks, for example, has long taken part in voter registration drives. That association helps to raise the company’s profile and enables it to support a cause that all its customers, however they vote, should be able to support. When the coffee chain takes part in registration drives or helps to organize events to encourage voter registration, it often broadcasts them live. Viewers get to see a street party—often with celebrities—and they see the company’s logo.

Much of today’s marketing strategy is content marketing.

Businesses issue a steady stream of information to customers that help them to remain informed and educated about a topic they find interesting. Customers get to satisfy their curiosity, and the brand gets to show off its expertise, build trust, and create a connection with its audience.

That content comes in a number of different forms. It might take the form of articles, both original and shared. It could take the form of images or the release of data that reveal trends and the results of experiments. But it can also take the form of interviews with other experts.

A surf shop, for example, might interview a surfer about how they use their boards and find great waves. Those interviews could be published as text on the surf shop’s blog. They could be uploaded as video that’s cut and edited to include the best content and make both the shop and the surfer look their best.

But it could also take the form of a live video. That allows audience members to participate. They could use the comment form to ask questions, like a radio phone-in. The interviewee wouldn’t even need to travel to the company itself.

Businesses like BeLive.tv provide third-party plugins that create split-screen interviews, like in news broadcasts. The interviewer could sit in the office while the interviewee remains at home and talks through their webcam or their phone. It’s a very easy way to add interactive, visual content to a content marketing strategy.

Live video is the only marketing tool that combines immediacy, visual imagery, and interaction. Work it into your marketing strategy and you’ll give your sales efforts a powerful boost.

image credit: ySxubvil

The post Where Live Video Fits into Your Marketing Strategy appeared first on ReadWrite.

Facebook’s Libra landed with a splash. It’s since drifted into stormy waters. What Mark Zuckerberg might have seen as a simple way for his users to send and receive money online — governments and regulators have taken to a whole new level. Some have seen an evil plan to take over the world, or at least an attempt to dominate global finances.

Some US lawmakers have expressed skepticism about the Libra regulations project.

Others have told Facebook that they really shouldn’t be creating currencies. A few have even begun drafting bills that would outlaw reserve-backed digital currencies like Libra (and presumably Tether.)

The reaction abroad has been no more than sympathetic.

Britain’s Information Commissioner recently raised concerns about a company like Facebook. We know that FB has suffered several data leaks, adding financial information about its users to the data.

The company already possesses all the information about their client’s tastes, preferences, and friends.

Commissioner Denham’s concerns join reservations expressed by regulators from Canada, Australia, and the European Union.  The EU’s antitrust regulator has opened a probe.

Recent reports suggest that the pushback is affecting. Some of the 28 members of the Libra Association are said to be re-thinking their $10 million pledge to help establish the foundation that will govern Libra.

It’s possible that other partners will follow and that the concern that Libra has generated will kill the project.

It’s likely too that Facebook is just the wrong company to manage digital currency. Facebook has enough power without adding global financial control too. But it’s also possible that the interest that Libra has generated from regulators is exactly what the cryptocurrency world needs.

Bitcoin started as a libertarian project, a way for people to conduct transactions free of political interference.

But that lack of oversight has given money launderers, fraudsters, and market manipulators a free-rein. FinCEN, America’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, says that it now receives 1,500 reports of suspicious activity every month relating to cryptocurrency transactions.

The result of all of that suspicious activity is that the public still doesn’t trust Bitcoin specifically or cryptocurrencies generally.

Currency investors understand that the value of the dollar or the euro is a measure of the demand for those currencies in international business. The price of the dollar rises when more enterprises are making dollar transactions.

But people don’t understand why the price of Bitcoin suddenly spikes or falls when so few real purchases are made using the coin.

As long as there’s a feeling that someone who knows more than they know can gain an advantage in the market, they’ll stay away. And that’s even before they start to tackle the challenge of buying Bitcoin, holding it securely, and finding a seller willing to accept it when they make a purchase.

For Bitcoin purists, the idea that cryptocurrencies might benefit from government oversight is almost blasphemous.

But if Bitcoin is ever to extend beyond speculators, early adopters, and true believers, it needs stability and transparency. Regulation has its problems, but it can bring predictability.

Holders of the currency can know that their assets will still be around in a year and won’t be devalued by a committee they don’t understand. They’ll be able to make transactions using a digital coin without being seen as money launderers or drug dealers. They’ll feel that the coin does have something behind it.

Libra might be coming under an attack strong enough to stop the project in its tracks.

Take a thought that the regulation and oversight the project leaves behind could well create precisely the kind of infrastructure that other cryptocurrencies need.

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Technology affects every aspect of our lives. It affects the way we communicate, and how we travel, but it also determines how we learn, how we bank, and the way we run our businesses. Futurist speakers think about those changes and try to understand how they’ll affect us. Here are the top five issues faced by futurists and the areas to which they’re paying a lot of attention.

The Top Five Issues Faced by Futurists

Artificial Intelligence 

Stephen Hawking has warned about its dangers. >Elon Musk has called it humanity’s “biggest existential threat” and recently announced a new brain-computer interface to combat its effects. But Artificial Intelligence is coming, and some people are talking about what it means, what it will do?

What do we need to do to prevent ourselves from being locked out of the airlock door by future Hals? Adam Cheyer isn’t just a futurist speaker. As one of the founders of Siri, he’s also one of the people who has helped to create that future. Neil Jacobstein chairs the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Track at Singularity University and talks about AI and robotics.

Both are grappling with a future world not dominated by human intelligence.

Education

The future belongs to those who know. If robots take over the dull, repetitive jobs, most of the work remaining will require specialist knowledge. That means improving education and training will be vital. Phill Nosworthy is the founder and managing director of Switch L+D, a bespoke learning and development company that helps teams level up.

Tan Le is the founder and CEO of EMOTIV, a “neuroinformatics company” that researches the human brain and makes brain-based wearables. While Phill Nosworthy focuses on how people should use their brain, Tan Le looks at ways to make more use of it.

Big Data

We surrender private data every time we walk with our phones, make a purchase, or open a website. As that data continues to build, companies will need to get better at safeguarding it. Governments will need to get better at regulating it. And we all need to get better at understanding it.

Mike Walsh is helping with that understanding. He’s written about the power of algorithms and how data is transforming industries. François Bourdoncle is CEO of FB&Cie, a strategy consultancy focused on transformations driven by Big Data.

Fintech

The way we bank and move money has already changed. We used to have to line up for hours at local branches, balance checkbooks, and pay with cash. Now we do all our banking with our thumbs, from cashing a check to applying for a loan. The blockchain has moved currencies out of the control of national banks, while companies like Paypal allow us all to pass money around with no more than a swipe.

As the future becomes increasingly cashless, Ayesha Khanna is helping us to prepare. She wrote her first book on the topic back in 2007. Fintech Asia has called her a leading fintech influencer, and she continues to discuss the relationship between AI and finance.

Christer Holloman is the CEO and co-founder of finance platform Divido and has worked with companies including Visa and BMW. His talks on the future of finance are filled with real examples and case studies.

Clean Energy

Are we leaving the age of fossil fuels? Can clean energy meet all our needs? What do we need to do to make renewables work, and how will a new energy source change our lives? As car companies focus on electric vehicles and researchers look for more efficient ways to power our houses with the sun, Peter Zeihan includes the energy sector in his geopolitical analyses.

Vivek Wadhwa has won numerous awards for his contributions to technology and written several books on technology’s effect on our lives. He has also written and talked about the rise of clean energy and what it will mean, especially in the developing world.

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Mark Zuckerberg has already changed the way we market. The rise of Facebook, with its mixture of detailed personal demographics and ongoing engagement, has forced marketers to create new ways of building relationships with leads and customers. As the platform has grown, we’ve all grown used to creating posts, producing videos, broadcasting live, answering questions, and carefully targeting ads. The launch of Libra could change social media marketing.

The new cryptocurrency called Libra.

The new cryptocurrency, managed by an independent association but closely associated with Facebook, aims to provide an easy way to make online transactions. Instead of using a currency controlled by a national bank and limited by national boundaries, anyone anywhere will be able to buy or sell goods using the genuinely international currency.

A basket of fiat currencies will give Libra stability, avoiding the volatility problems that have hindered the use of Bitcoin. The result should be smooth, reliable transactions for Internet-based customers who won’t need to enter credit card details or pay third-parties like PayPal.

Libra taking-off as planned; results for marketers a whole new world.

One of the biggest challenges for social media marketers has been the difficulty of assigning causation. We can see how far a piece of content reaches. We can measure its level of engagement. We can track how much traffic a post or an ad drives to a website.

But it’s much harder to measure the amount of revenue any piece of content produces. We know we’re building engagement, but we can’t always tell the depth of that engagement or how much it’s worth to the business.

That’s what Libra can change. By allowing people to hit a Buy button that will take their money immediately. Social media marketing will acquire a whole new action—and marketers will be able to add a new metric to their statistics.

Actions on behavior.

The quick action will affect behavior. Some marketers will focus solely on the number of sales a post generates. They’ll experiment with different content forms to generate maximum conversions. They’ll worry less about engagement and audience retention and more about the amount of money a post produces immediately.

Producers of live video, currently a critical engagement tool often used for product demos and Q&As, may find that it pays to keep broadcasting. They can turn their live videos into something that looks a lot like a shopping channel, with sales coming in as they talk.

The smartest marketers will find that the addition of an instant Buy button doesn’t take away from social media marketing.

• They’ll combine those benefits to produce new kinds of funnels.
• Some posts will introduce the brand to new markets.
• Other posts will promote the benefits of the brand and its products.
• Finally, at the end of the funnel, social media marketers will be able to use Libra’s new functionality to turn those previous efforts into cash.

All of this will require a new way of thinking about social media marketing.

• It will require new sales strategies and new kinds of messages.
• The exact forms those messages will take will only become clear as Libra takes off, and marketers experiment.
• We can expect to see plenty of failed hard sales efforts before smart marketers hit on a combination of engagement and call to action that produces the best results.
• We can also expect that Facebook marketing will become less about branding and engagement and more about conversions.

But whether Libra will be successful and trigger this change is even harder to predict than the form of the new social media marketing itself.

“Libra Cryptocurrency Gold Coin by Facebook” by orgalpari is licensed under CC BY 2.0

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Entrepreneurs always make mistakes. When you’re building a business, you will get things wrong. Everyone does. It’s part of the learning process. If you’re not failing occasionally, you’re not trying hard enough. Let me explain the biggest mistake your startup is making.

Some mistakes, though, are more significant than others—and there’s one mistake that’s the biggest of all.

It’s not a marketing mistake. To discover your audience, you will need to experiment. You’ll run ads that fail to generate a response. You’ll target the wrong demographic, appeal on the wrong platforms, and make offers that don’t resonate.

It can be annoying to launch a marketing campaign, track the figures, and not see any clicks or conversions. But each of those “mistakes” tells you something. They teach you what doesn’t work, and they let you cross one more strategy off your list of marketing ideas.

As the testing list shrinks, you will hit on approaches resonate. You’ll sharpen your strategies.

You’ll improve the messaging and add urgency to your product or service. You’ll figure out what works until eventually, through trial and error and smart adjustments, you’ll have a marketing campaign. When you finally find the correct campaign, you can set up and run whenever you launch a product.

The wrong product isn’t a mistake either, although it can feel like one.

When Hahna Alexander launched a pair of shoes that charged a battery as people walked, she thought she had the ideal solution to mobile charge anxiety. Wearers decided they preferred to put a spare battery in their bag and wear sandals.

Alexander went back to the drawing board. She changed the product slightly. Instead of powering a battery, the dynamos she’d placed in the soles would power GPS and health monitors. Now her SolePower company is working with rescue workers, the construction industry, and the military to keep people doing dangerous jobs connected.

Product creation is always an iterative process.

You can never tell how people will use a product until they get it in their hands and are operating it. Then you can start making adjustments and create an even better product. Also, hiring the wrong people isn’t a mistake. Sure, an employee who doesn’t pull their weight or a partner who doesn’t see eye-to-eye can hold you back. But there are always solutions to that problem.

Part of the job of growing a startup is learning how to manage people.

If an employee isn’t delivering the results you want, then helping them to level up will help you to level up. It’s better to acquire those management skills when the team is still small than once the company has grown, and you’re leading a team of a hundred. Inevitably, you will have to lay people off, and you’ll need to learn how to do that too.

If a partner always disagrees, maybe you’re the problem, not them.

Maybe you’re too stuck in your viewpoint and need to learn to see things from a broader perspective. Or perhaps it’s time to break up. The end of a partnership can be even more traumatic than firing an employee, but it could give you just the break you need. None of those experiences are really “mistakes.”

There’s only one fatal mistake you can make when building a startup: not enjoying the process.

You might be dreaming of the exit and looking forward to spending the big check from Google. You may imagine yourself at the top of a giant company with your name on the building. But there’s no guarantee you’re going to reach those destinations.

There is a guarantee that you’re going to be traveling down a path. The path will be the pieces of your life, so pick up and carry those pieces. Make this life and your journey so you can enjoy it. Thinking only of the endpoint is the one mistake that will ensure you never reach it.

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Live video is one of the most effective tools that marketers can use to reach and engage audiences. It allows businesses to address large numbers of customers at the same time. You are able to demonstrate products, and to make offers, but also to answer questions and quash objections. Here are some of the biggest mistakes made by live broadcasters.

Whether the broadcast is made on Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other platform, it’s a hugely valuable and unique way to turn leads into customers. Your listens and customers become your loyal fans. Because live video is new, it’s also easy to get wrong.

Here are four mistakes that live broadcasters often make and how to correct them.

• Not Broadcasting at a Regular Time 

Live videos are a lot like television shows, and like television shows, they need to go out when people expect them. When you broadcast at the same time each week, your audience knows when to find you and when they can ask you questions. Watching the broadcasts becomes a part of their routine that they don’t want to break.

Change the hour, or broadcast only when you feel like it, and they’ll miss those videos—and missing videos will become part of their routine. Use your stats to identify the time when the most significant numbers of your users are online. Trail the broadcast in the days and hours leading up to the video. Talk about it in your newsletters and content to encourage people to see the next one. And make regular broadcasts part of your routine.

• Not Preparing Content in Advance 

Live videos allow for audience participation. Viewers can ask questions in the comments, and the broadcaster can answer them in real-time. That can turn live videos into live AMAs, which are fun and valuable. But you can’t depend on people asking good questions that interest other viewers. If you don’t receive any questions at all or if the only questions you receive are about specific orders instead of general product benefits you won’t be providing good content.

Instead of handing control of the content to your viewers, prepare content in advance. Show how to use your product. Talk through changes you’re making to the next model. Discuss a feature that people often overlook. And as you’re talking, take questions. That will keep the audience participation but still ensure that you’re giving valuable content.

• Failing to Greet or Interact with Viewers 

If one mistake is depending entirely on audience interaction, another mistake is to ignore audience interaction. The audience’s ability to contact a broadcaster is too vast a benefit to ignore. No other service—even live television—has anything like this.

Even call-in radio depends on a producer who chooses which questions to put through. During a live broadcast, audiences can talk to the broadcaster and each other. Tools like Be.live make it easy to bring viewers into the conversation. It’s a unique advantage, and it’s a mistake not to make the most of it.

Greet audience members by name as you see them log in. Encourage them to ask questions. And as you see the same names returning time after time, bring them into the conversation. They’re your most loyal fans, and they’ll bring others with them.

• Not Ending with a Call to Action

A live video is usually about branding, audience engagement, or content management, so live broadcasters often ignore the call to action. They’re happy enough to pull their audience closer and building a connection. But your audience should know where to go and what to do next.

Always leave your audience with something to do when the broadcast ends. That doesn’t have to be placing an order—although it could be this action. You could ask your audience to please copy what you did in your product demonstration.

You could ask the listeners to send in their own pictures. Or request your followers tune in next week at the same time. Stay in your audience’s minds even when you’re not broadcasting.

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The world of cryptocurrency is still new, and we all need guidance. Paying attention to people who understand the technology and can explain what’s going on could be helpful. Here are ten crypto gurus you just have to follow.

1. Charlie Lee

Charlie Lee is the creator of Litecoin, the silver to Bitcoin’s gold. He was born to Chinese parents in Ivory Coast but moved to the United States when he was thirteen. He studied computer science at MIT, then worked for a couple of software firms before joining Google. It was there that he first came across the blockchain. He sees Litecoin not as a competitor to Bitcoin but as a complement to it. He hopes that people will use Litecoin for everyday purchases while using Bitcoin for large international transactions. Follow Charlie @SatoshiLite.

2. Ran Neuner

Ran Neuner came to cryptocurrency from the world of marketing. Between 2001 and 2015, he built Africa’s biggest sales and marketing agency, eventually selling it to the French advertising firm Publicis. Now enraptured by blockchain technology, he presents the Crypto Trader show for CNBC Africa. You can find his videos on his website CryptoManRan.

3. Peter Kent

Peter Kent has written more than 60 books on topics covering technology, business, and online marketing. He has now created a video course called Crypto Clear: Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency Made Simple. He explains how to buy, sell, and store cryptocurrencies securely. He’s a great place to turn when you’re looking to learn crypto fast.

4. Jimmy Song

While Peter Kent explains cryptocurrencies to mainstream audiences, Jimmy Song is a programmer who talks to other tech people. He worked on Bitcoin Core, and was VP Engineering at Armory, the  Bitcoin wallet. He’s now the editor of Bitcointechtalk.com and the author of Programming Bitcoin, a guide to coding the cryptocurrency. His Medium posts are a must-read.

5. Vinny Lingham

Vinny Lingham is a serial entrepreneur and one of the investors on South Africa’s version of the Dragon’s Den TV show. His companies have included Gyft, a mobile gift card company; Yola, a website-building firm; and more recently, Civic, a blockchain-based personal identity firm. His personal website, VinnyLingham, is occasionally updated but a rich source of important thoughts about cryptocurrencies. You can also find him @vinnylingham.

6. Changpeng Zhao

Changpeng Zhao came into the world of cryptocurrency from conventional finance. He wrote software for the Tokyo Stock Exchange and for Bloomberg Tradebook, before founding Fusion Systems, a Shanghai company that conducted high-frequency trading for brokers. From there, he moved into crypto, first as CTO of OKCoin, then as the founder of what would become the world’s biggest exchange, Binance. He tweets a lot.

7. Laura Shin

Laura Shin was a senior editor of Forbes who was given the cryptocurrency beat. She’s now branched out on her own, publishing a newsletter and the Unchained podcast on all things crypto. For anyone interested in the blockchain world, her podcasts are unmissable.

8. Patrick Byrne

Patrick Byrne is the founder of Overstock, an online retail giant that was also one of the first big Internet firms to accept Bitcoin. But Byrne isn’t limiting himself to accepting payments in cryptocurrencies. He’s also investing in a number of crypto ventures. His Medici Ventures conglomerate, a subsidiary of Overstock, contains companies that use the blockchain to secure identities, build land ownership records, protect elections, and manage agriculture, among other uses. He doesn’t tweet much but he does sometimes take part in debates and talks.

9. Taylor Monahan

Taylor Monahan started her tech career as a Front End developer. When Ethereum launched, she and her partner started MyEtherWallet to help people create paper wallets and use the Ethereum blockchain. Three years later, Monahan left to set up MyCrypto, a cryptocurrency wallet. She tweets but also posts regularly on Medium.

10. Justin Sun

Justin Sun might just be most famous for bidding $4.5 million to pitch his cryptocurrency platform TRON to Warren Buffett. Before creating TRON, Sun had been an advisor to Ripple and was the CEO of BitTorrent. If you want to know what information Sun believed was worth paying $4.5 million to share, you can join the million-plus people following his Twitter account.

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Social media has always made it possible for businesses to communicate with audiences. Live streaming has made that communication two-way. Businesses can talk to an audience, and that audience can use the comments to interact with the broadcaster. There are three top tools to broadcast to Facebook Live.

A broadcaster on Facebook can ask questions, they can show their approval, and they can even chat with other viewers.

A cosmetics seller could broadcast a live demonstration while viewers ask questions about specific skin types, and other viewers describe their own experiences. Selling in this way is a very different and very effective way of marketing.

Platforms such as Facebook make the process simple enough, but several third-party providers have now added to those services. Facebook’s platform and made it even more compelling for companies that want to engage and sell. Leading the way is BeLive. This service integrates with Facebook to enable broadcasters to conduct split-screen interviews.

So you could talk to another expert in your field, and your audience would see both of you on the screen, just like a news broadcast. You can even create a kind of talk show that puts as many as four people on the screen at the same time, with ten waiting on a type of lobby to join the conversation.

Perhaps the best feature offered by BeLive is branding and communication. The platform lets broadcasters use their own logos, frames, and colors, and create chyrons. So as you’re answering a viewer’s question, an assistant could put that question on the screen or pick out the best comments flowing alongside the video. It’s all you need to make the broadcast effective.

Ecamm is aimed at Mac users and has similar functions. You can add overlays to live broadcasts, share your Mac desktop (which is useful for software demos and tutorials), and switch between different camera views. That sounds useful, but it risks being disorienting for viewers, and it might even be too professional.

One of the benefits of live video is that it brings viewers close to a brand. They can feel like they’re talking directly to a business or an expert in the same way they might Facetime a friend. Switching between camera views might give a broadcast the slickness of a shopping channel broadcast but at the expense of intimacy.

The green screen feature that lets you change your background does have the potential for lots of fun, though. Finally, Crowdcast is a bit simpler. It puts a lot of emphasis on its fast onboarding. The platform has a straightforward setup, with no downloads.

Facebook Live is very simple. It’s the extra features that you’re looking for from a third party. Where Crowdcast does offer some benefits is in its engagement features—the platform provides polls and interactive Q&As—and in its stats data.

You can track performance with advanced analytics, and also connect with Zapier. So you could, for example, set up an automated response to someone who clicks a link placed in the comments. The platform is particularly popular with users of Patreon who use it to drum up support for their fundraising and answer questions from potential donors.

Facebook Live is powerful by itself. But the social media site has left plenty of room for other businesses to add features and get even more benefits out of live broadcasting. Whether you’re focused on interviews and answering questions, want to turn your Mac into a television control room, or want to give a Patreon campaign a bit of a boost, Facebook Live and its third party support will help you meet your goals.

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A lot of big claims are made about cryptocurrency in general and Bitcoin in particular. It’s going to change the world, we’re told. The foundation of those big cryptocurrency claims has nothing to do with Bitcoin’s value — or the fact that it only exists in a digital form. It’s the future of money. It’s a whole new way of thinking about currency and capital and finance. There are three main reasons decentralization is the future of currency.

The future of currency will all come down to decentralization. That term is essential for changing the way currency currently operates.

Decentralization is Important for Three Reasons.

• You Can’t Manipulate a Decentralized Currency

Governments have all sorts of tools at their disposal affect currency rates. If they merely print more money—as they did during the recovery from the last crash—the value of the currency will fall. If they change interest rates, they affect the supply of money available, also changing its value. Governments can also spend more taxpayer’s money, sending more of the currency to run through the economy.

• Currency leaves a lot of power in the hands of government and officials whose decision-making isn’t always predictable.

Decentralized cryptocurrencies can’t be manipulated. There will never be more than 21 million Bitcoins in circulation. They’re currently released at a rate of 1,800 every day, and no individual or group has the power to change the release rate. Unlike fiat currency, the value of cryptocurrency is only set by the market and can’t be affected by a government decision.

• Decentralized Currencies are Democratic

That makes decentralized currencies the most democratic form of money ever created. Because it’s not the currency of any country, no government decision can set its price. Decentralized currencies are entirely in the control of the people who use it. The more people who use Bitcoin to make transactions, the more demand there will be, and the higher the price will rise. But no government or body can try to counteract that pressure by producing more coins. It’s all down to the people.

• Decentralized Currencies Are Truly Global

Perhaps the most outstanding reason that decentralized currencies are the future of money is that they’re truly global. Sure, there might be lots of Bitcoin miners in China. Just as decentralized currencies have no central authority that sets their value, so they also have no central location. Cryptocurrency users can send a digital coin from Nebraska to Nairobi and on to Nagasaki without ever running into trouble at an international border.

This freedom to send money digitally is how the world operates now. Globally we might still be made up of nation-states — but business is global and has no borders.

A product made in one country will often have been assembled from parts ordered from a dozen other countries and sold to half a dozen more. The global economy needs a currency free of the control of any government, and that can be used to ensure that each of those transactions takes place smoothly.

Business will always go forward to become more international.

Every company wants to find new markets, and it wants as few barriers as possible, blocking its ability to sell to those markets. A decentralized currency makes doing business around the world more accessible. That’s the future of money.

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