Monthly Archives: June 2019

So far, the first business outside Orania that has agreed to accept the cryptocurrency is the owner of a restaurant and beard-oil shop in Pretoria called Buffelsfontein. Located in a neighborhood called Menlo Park, the shop advertises itself as suitable to the kind of man who would drink beer out of a honey badger’s scrotum. The burly, bearded manager had told me he couldn’t imagine moving to Orania, so accepting e-Ora, and ora before it, was the best he could do. But maybe he’d buy a vacation home there someday.The town leader, Carel Boshoff—who happens to be the grandson of Betsie and Hendrik Verwoerd—sees the e-Ora as crucial to building a virtual community of Afrikaners. I meet him and his son, Willem, at a family resort on the banks of the Orange River. It’s a Sunday, and they’re both dressed for church.Boshoff’s vision goes something like this: In Orania, the e-Ora will be a cheaper, easier-to-use replacement for the ora. Elsewhere, sympathetic Afrikaners will take it up as an “act of patriotism.” They will trade among themselves using the e-Ora, and perhaps start investing in Orania, allowing the town to pave more roads and build more houses and craft breweries. As more Afrikaners feel marginalized and eventually give up on South Africa, they will find a budding city waiting for them in the Karoo.

With Russia and Iran spearheading a new level of internet fragmentation, they’re not just threatening the global network architecture (cables, servers) or working to allow the government to greatly control information flows and crack down on freedoms; their actions could also inspire others to follow suit and create geopolitical implications extending far beyond those two countries’ borders.Let’s look at another country that has tightened control over its internet. China has long been the gold standard for internet censorship. Its Golden Shield Project, originally conceived as a surveillance database to strengthen police control, now manifests in the sophisticated Great Firewall. The government filters what information flows into the country as well as what requests are sent out using techniques like deep packet inspection and IP blacklisting.Many thought this kind of internet splintering, with different kinds of content served to different countries, was the worst it could get. The New York Times editorial board has written about contrasting internet spheres in Europe, China, and the United States. Google’s Eric Schmidt has spoken about a bifurcation between a Chinese and non-Chinese internet (the latter led by the US). Indeed, the scale, technological sophistication, and economic influence of Chinese internet censorship is unprecedented. And it goes beyond China’s borders; Beijing wants to rewrite the rules of the global internet as well.Yet for all of this noise, the internet “fragmentation” here is quite superficial—there are alterations to information flows on top of internet architecture, yes, but not alterations to the architecture itself. China still relies upon the likes of the global domain name system to manage web traffic. Its government has yet to permanently cut or unplug major internet routing points. The fragmentation is occurring on the surface level of the net, rather than on the lowest levels. In fact, filtering information rather than halting its flow is what enables Beijing’s delicate balancing act of content control with the economic benefits of internet openness.Russia and Iran, however, are pursuing something different—a much deeper kind of internet fragmentation, one that may be less reversible and more attractive to countries who want rigid control over information.When Vladimir Putin signed a bill in early May to create a domestic Russian internet, the law encompassed not just increased government authority over internet exchange points (IXPs) that route global traffic in and out of Russian borders, but policies like the build-out of a national domain name system, which is overseen by Roskomnadzor, Russia’s internet regulator. It’s aiming at a whole new level of Russian cyber sovereignty. Further, because the RUnet is meant to operate independently from the global net, this and other measures will likely involve physically cutting or moving cables and/or altering internet routing protocols to limit the traffic that comes into or out of the country.Iran, meanwhile, has reached 80 percent completion of its so-called national information network. Tehran, like Moscow, hopes to reduce its country’s reliance on the global network through one that can be domestically operated. Censorship pervasive on the Iranian internet is already coupled with measures that double the cost of accessing foreign news sites, to incentivize citizens to use the domestic network—incentives that will only grow stronger should more domestic isolation take hold. As with Russia, claims about better defending Iran from foreign cyber threats have also been cited here as justification. Others argue that sanctions have played a role as well.These two countries’ decisions to build isolated domestic internets represent a new form of internet fragmentation—one poised to be far more physical than what we’ve seen before. While today citizens in net-censored countries can often use virtual private networks and other tools to circumvent filters, that could become impossible if their domestic internets are disconnected from the global one. In turn, this will only accelerate global crackdowns on internet freedom and allow authoritarian regimes to consolidate power. But there are also significant geopolitical implications far beyond the borders of Russia or Iran.

Renowned stockbroker and libertarian Peter Schiff enables investors to purchase gold and silver using BCH and BTC, via Schiffgold.com, and to take physical delivery of it. Buying precious metals doesn’t have to necessitate assuming custody of course – in fact in most cases it doesn’t. Yield-bearing crypto company Kinesis has initiated an EU and U.K.-wide debit card program with Contis Group, using real assets of gold and silver as the basis for digital currencies, which have a 1:1 allocation with physical bullion, essentially making gold spendable.Another way of obtaining exposure to gold without ever setting eyes on an ingot is through Currency.com, which enables tokenized commodities to be traded including spot gold, at up to 100X leverage, using BTC or ETH. Like bitcoin, gold can assume many forms for investors, with derivatives, synthetic products, and third party custody taking precedence over non-custodial solutions. There’s the Digix gold token (DGT), for instance, tradable on various cryptocurrency exchanges, each unit of which represents one gram of gold.

« Donner du sens » fait vendre : les trois-quarts des consommateurs achètent des marques qui partagent leurs valeurs et 90% des consommateurs s'attendent à ce que les marques leur offrent du contenu. Pourtant, plus de la moitié du contenu des marques ne leur apporte rien, selon l'étude Meaningful Brands 2019 concoctée par Havas. Pour accompagner les annonceurs dans une création vertueuse, l’agence de conseil lance aujourd'hui le Label Meaningful Contents. Par cette initiative, le mastodonte de la communication mondiale s'engage sur toute la chaine de valeur, de la conceptualisation à la médiatisation des contenus, en passant par la direction artistique et la production. Afin de lancer la machine, Havas annonce un partenariat avec Brut et sa régie publicitaire, France Télévisions Publicité. Cette collaboration vise à proposer aux annonceurs des dispositifs différenciants de communication corporate et financière, thèmes structurants encore peu exploités auprès du grand public, mais également à leur offrir l’attention des millenials, principaux consommateurs du média vidéoludique. Rencontre avec Amir Bendjaballah, Head of Content Consulting Socialyse Paris et coordinateur du label, pour voir ce que son bébé a dans le ventre.

Un peu plus d’un an après le premier vol test de Vahana Alpha One, Airbus dévoile une nouvelle version de son prototype de taxi-drone. Baptisé Alpha Two, ce nouveau démonstrateur grandeur nature est situé à Pendleton dans l’Oregon.Un prototype qui permettra au constructeur d’avoir à disposition sur place des pièces de rechange si nécessaire. De plus, Alpha Two est le premier démonstrateur Vahana doté d’un intérieur fini. L’opportunité pour Airbus d’envisager ainsi d’effectuer des vols habités.

Réserver un lieu de travail dans un restaurant londonien via une application, ce sera possible dès le 10 juin. Le groupe de restaurants D & D, qui veut assurer l’ouverture de ses établissements toute la journée, propose aux « travailleurs » de savoir quels restaurants ont des places disponibles. Ils peuvent ainsi réserver une table de restaurant depuis l’application Workroom, table qui momentanément aura une fonction de bureau. Cinq restaurants londoniens seront disponibles sur l’application: 100 Wardour St, Bluebird Chelsea, Bluebird City, Fiume et Radici. Les modes de paiement seront multiples. Le paiement pourra se faire à l’utilisation et une carte journalière de 10 livres sterling sera également proposée. Des forfaits de trois, cinq ou dix passages seront également proposés aux prix respectifs de 25, 50 et 75 livres sterling. Sur place, le groupe promet "une connexion wi-fi rapide et de nombreuses prises de courant". Il sera également possible de commander à boire ou à manger. 

Store of Value Vs. PaymentsBTC maximalists have been pushing the idea that Satoshi Nakamoto purposely designed Bitcoin to be a store-of-value (SoV) or the next digital gold. This debate has raged on for years, but more recently certain so-called thought leaders have determined that Bitcoin was meant to be an SoV and there’s absolutely no way it was designated to be peer-to-peer cash. Some have even said that Satoshi used the words peer-to-peer and cash because they think he/she couldn’t come up with anything better, while some have had the audacity to say they would go back in time and remove the words “cash” from the white paper.One BTC proponent, Dan Held, cofounder of Zeroblock and Interchange HQ, has been bolstering the SoV narrative for quite some time. Held calls bitcoiners who believe otherwise the “cheap payments side” and often dismisses those who disagree him by saying “you don’t get it.” “Still think Bitcoin was meant for cheap coffee payments? Then you need to read this thread,” explained Held on Twitter. Throughout the subsequent thread, Held shares a variety of quotes from Satoshi that makes him believe the technology was purposely built to serve as a store of value.However, on June 6 the cofounder of OB1, Samuel Patt, stated that he disagrees with the SoV theory and Held’s subjective valuation. OB1’s Patt has written a post called the “Breakdown of all Satoshi’s Writings Proves Bitcoin not Built Primarily as a Store of Value,” which shows Satoshi’s writings predominantly lean toward a payment system. Patt’s highly detailed post combs through hundreds of forum threads, emails from Satoshi, and the software itself. “After reviewing all of Satoshi’s writings, I can confidently state that Bitcoin was not purpose-built to first be a store of value — It was built for payments,” the research paper notes. Alongside this, Patt says he is merely debating the historical premise that BTC was purpose-built to be an SoV. Not what BTC is today or what it should be in the future, the author details.“But that doesn’t mean that people should be given a free pass to rewrite history and make false claims about Satoshi’s intentions,” Patt writes. “That’s intellectually dishonest and needs to be called out.”

This year, for the first time, adults in China will spend over half of their daily media time on the internet. This is largely a result of increased government efforts to transform and develop internet infrastructure in the more rural parts of the country.

Beginning this fall, Apple Watch will track your activity trends over time, help protect your hearing by alerting you to harmful levels of ambient noise, and allow users to track their menstrual cycles. Individually, these improvements might look small or trivial. But given the watch's existing health and fitness features, this new bundle of capabilities underscores Apple’s push to make its smartwatch the control center for your personal health. Sure, calculating a tip from your wrist is neat. But a personal companion that monitors your well-being everywhere you go? That, Apple is betting, is the future.Today, the Apple Watch is one of the best health and fitness trackers you can buy. This wasn't always the case. When it launched in 2015, Apple marketed its wearable as a less intrusive extension of the iPhone—a cure for the vampiric relationship between phones and human attention. Health and fitness were an afterthought, and it showed: Early models lacked GPS, which made the watch unattractive to runners. Submerging it in water could drown the speaker and microphone, which kept it off the wrists of serious swimmers. The built-in heart rate sensor only read your pulse a handful of times per minute, and the meager battery life forced most Apple Watches to spend their nights charging on bedside tables, instead of gathering data on users’ wrists. Companies like Garmin and Fitbit had long offered wearables with those features, and many health-conscious consumers remained loyal to them.

Although Facebook’s user experience is less dedicated to social shopping, the platform’s dominance of the social media landscape, along with retail brands’ usage of targeted ads for customer acquisition, makes it a key traffic driver to ecommerce sites. According to Adobe, Facebook drove 80.4% of all US social referral to retail sites in Q1 2019, followed by Instagram (10.7%) and Pinterest (8.2%).