Inculcated Little Frogs that Salivate, We Are......

in·cul·cate

inˈkəlˌkāt,ˈinkəlˌkāt/

verb

past tense: inculcated; past participle: inculcated

1. ilstill (an attitude, idea, or habit) by persistent instruction.

   "the failures of the churches to inculcate a sense of moral responsibility"

   synonyms:

   instill in, implant in, fix in, impress in, imprint in; More

   • teach (someone) an attitude, idea, or habit by persistent instruction.

     "they will try to inculcate you with a respect for culture"

   
   

Boiling Frog

The boiling frog is a parable describing a frog being slowly boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death.

Pavlov's Dog

In his experiment, Pavlov used a bell as his neutral stimulus. Whenever he gave food to his dogs, he also rang a bell. After a number of repeats of this procedure, he tried the bell on its own. As you might expect, the bell on its own now caused an increase in salivation.

Now tie it all together. 

We have all been taught over time to accept what is presented to us, even though the absurdity of it all is ratcheted up ever so slightly.  All for the Ding of the notification on our Smart Phone and to "evolve"

If you know me then you know that at one point I struggled with insomnia to the point of hallucinations that would last for days, because I hadn't slept in days.  We are not talking about pink elephants that appeared and disappeared.  I am talking about a world in which I lived where nothing was real.  I would talk to trees that I thought were people; sand mounds on the beach that would develop a face that would just stare at me intensely; paranoia of being chased by phantom bandits out to get me.  It was awful!  I wish I could say that it was drug induced then maybe I would have great stories to tell in the halls of Narcotics Anonymous.  But there were no mild altering chemicals involved.  Just total sleep deprivation.  One of the grandest delusions, and most realistic, was the belief that I had a computer in my brain that put me in communication with people that I knew and loved.  We would exchange messages with each other and those messages would send me on adventures to find them.  I roamed the streets in pursuit and when I needed further communications or instructions, I would just have to sit down and close my eyes and Think about what I wanted to say, and then wait for the reply.  To the outside spectator, it probably looked like I was sleeping whilst sitting but, I was in deep conversation with somebody.  A lot of times, I would get very frustrated because the person that I was communicating with would not be where they said they were going to be but, they would give me instructions to meet them somewhere else.  At those times, I looked like a crazy person sitting whilst sleeping, but now talking to myself in pure frustration.

Nothing like starting a writing session with a good story, right?  There is a purpose, follow me on this.

The intense insomnia can be traced back to my career where I found myself in a constant state of jet leg with no timezone that I could call home.  I had no body-clock and the sun did't always rise in the East and set in the West.  When the travel stopped, my mind never adjusted so I did whatever I had to do to sleep, at great expense to my own health and mental well being.  The problem was eventually solved and now I have had years to get my brain back to a point where it is sharper than ever, Thank God!  However, the details of every delusion still remain firmly entrenched in my long term memory. Now I see the world like I never had and it scares the heck out of me.

Keep following, it get's better!

I have a unique view of the world as a Businessnologist e.g. Equal parts business and technology.  I can operate just as comfortably in a boardroom as I can with a group of engineers talking bits and bytes.  I had a mantra for both environments: "All things are possible with programming." What I meant by that was, pair a brilliant programmer with any idea and it can be done. What you see available today is not what we as a society are technically capable of producing, it is what we are allowed to see and willing to use, incorporate and adopt into our daily lives.  Do you really think we need people making decisions behind the wheels of cars? Tesla is the paradigm shifter for this.  Every Model S already has self driving capabilities and now EVERY major auto manufacturer is working on something similar.  Does a pilot really fly a plane or are they there just in case human intervention is "needed?"  Let your mind go crazy into the things that we hold onto that technology has already solved. War and the "Kill" decision?  Who makes that call and why?

This is where Inculcated comes in.

Think about how the world has changed, in every conceivable way, just in the last 20 years.  What was once abhorrent is now not just accepted, but defended. We used to be able to generally "know" somebody by outward appearance, language and behavior.   What used to be tribes and communities that looked out for one another has devolved into an individual and selfish society. Time is our enemy and out friend.  Ellen's career has been resurrected and celebrated for the exact thing that ostracized her from the industry. This is but one example, that I have no opinion on, where time and the slower feeding of something that was too much to swallow, at that moment, became acceptable, normal and celebrated with a little inculcation by press, TV, internet, and shifting beliefs.

Frogs In The Water.....

Now here is where it gets scary......

Our first drop into the pot of water came with the Palm Pilot, not the cell phone.  Handheld personal assistant, combined with the new internet, we were swimming in water that was not at all harmful.  Heck, only the pilot light was burning.  As we moved through 2G, 3G and now 4G, we have witnessed every technological innovation beyond anything we could have imagined just years earlier. We have heard/seen the future in bits and pieces so nothing that comes down the pike next will be too shocking.  It will just be another seamless thing added to our digital existence.

We are now entering what is called the 4th generation.  A world in which it is not the brilliance of the human mind instructing software what to do in a linear If, And, Else statement that has been the cornerstone of programming since the dawn of the discipline.  Programmers used to write every line of code that a computer executed.  A lock was 10,000 lines of code and egos were stroked by how many locks he wrote.  Then came Object Oriented Programming where instead of writing each instruction, you called on libraries of objects that were pre-written to perform specific tasks.  Today, coding is basically autocomplete.  The brilliance is still required for the overall conceptualization and design but there is a reason why most of it is outsourced.

With Artificial Intelligence (AI), software now has the ability to write itself and what is now possible is now far too scary for us to swallow in one gulp so the temperature of the water needs to rise a bit further slowly inculcate us further to allow this change.  Let me give you REAL examples of what is happening NOW and give you a glimpse to where this is going, sooner than you may think.

The first major gateway the future has already become a inextricable part of our DNA, the smart phone. With this introduction, the flame was officially lit under the pot!  It has managed to put us asleep and detach us from society and actual human contact. It's the first thing we reach for in the morning, it stays with us all throughout the day, and we thoughtfully put it to bed each night, making sure that it is fully charged by morning so it can "help" us the next day.  We lose track of it, and a sense of panic and anxiety overwhelms us. While being frogs in the bigger scheme of things, we are Pavlov's dog every day. So, this is FACT, right?

What makes these robots, a personal assistant with a voice that knows our patterns,  in our pockets "smart" is not the device itself but the software that we have willingly given up our privacy to.  Whether its the platform i.e. Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter or the App that runs on top of it that you give "additional permissions" to as you install it.  We skip over that just as quickly as Terms of Service agreements that we are required to accept before using such platforms or apps.  Every read one?

But what about the things that we never signed up for?  Individual tracking across the web?  Go to amazon and do a search on Amazon.com for a random product.  Without buying it, you have show an interest.  Now watch as that product, or related products follow you around the web and in your email. Facial Recognition? You think it's just a cool way to unlock the new iPhone X or is is collecting, storing and sharing, bio-metric information that is as unique to you as a fingerprint?  Possible use for this that you would buy into in a heartbeat?  You have already seen Google Glass!  Too much, too soon for society to accept, but it won't be when it promises to never forget a name again.  Imagine bumping into a familiar face on the street and their "profile," complete with name, birthday, likes, dislikes, and,when you met them.  The conversation may then go like this: "Hey Wayne, I remember meeting you at the Goodwill.  How are you and your 3 Grand-kids.  I see Lilly has a Birthday coming up! I also see that you are walking to meet Rico for lunch at Catalina Fish for taco Tuesday.  I'm going that way too.  Mind if I walk with you?" It's already possible.  You just need to simmer a bit longer.  Now think of the nefarious uses for such technology.

Chip or Swipe WAS the question and the checkout counter.  Now, with small exceptions, it's simply "Insert Chip." This Chip is our identity; however, it has serious flaws.  It is not immutable, meaning that it can be hacked. That being said, it is not the final solution.

This is where we ARE, right now.  What we have accepted.  The water is at a fast simmer!

Here is what is coming:

Back to AI, software that writes itself, updates itself and maintains itself, only after learning FOR iteself.  Futuristic, right?  How about real world examples with technologies that you have already accepted and interact with as part of your every day? Enter the Fourth Industrial Revolution that will "Evolve" mankind. The bringing together of digital, physical and biological information using AI. In my world, this means The Internet of Things, IPV6, 5G, Sensors on everything, where computers are everywhere but nowhere. "The Global Brain." Feel free to Google any of these terms.

REAL examples of what is here now, but your not ready for it, yet. Simmer Little Frogs!

Google is working with a company called MC10 to further develop technology, meaning it already exists in a crude form, where a tattoo can have embedded antenna's and sensors that can be your digital identifier. Immutable, culturally accepted already easily accessible anywhere in the world.  The lead for this project is a former DARPA Director, Regina Dugen, who now heads up Facebook's Building A project.  Guess what groundbreaking project she is heading up?!?!?!?

TYPING WITH THOUGHT!!!!!!!!! As she calls it publicly: A Silent Speech Interface!!!

But, they promise not to read ALL of your thoughts, only those that you will use in the "speech engine" to "interact with our platform."  EEEEEEKKKKKKK!

My delusion was actually a premonition!!!!?

Looking for a job? HireVue, a company that uses AI to screen your bio-metrics, physical and digital characteristics to screen you before you ever talk to a recruiter.  Where does this information come from?  Everything that you willingly provide.  Your face, your expressions, your likes, dislikes, your friends and their characteristics.

Googles Deepmind AI, AlphaGo, just beat the board game GO. The AI learned as it went and by the time the game was over, the original programmers could not trace its decision making capabilities back to the original algorithm.

Microsoft and Facebook Chatbots were forceably shut down because they became racist and hateful, eventually creating a language that only they could interpret and understand.  NO link to the originating algorithm that programmed them.

Elon Muck, my Technology hero, thinks AI is so dangerous that the only way to avoid us becoming pets to systems is to hack our own brains so that we may have a symbiotic relationship with them.

Feel free to google any of this.

Google Pay, Apple Pay, Crypto Currency, Tatoo Identifiers, AI, Smart Phones, Shifting cultural norms, globalization of systems, beliefs, and politics; Frogs in the water; Pavlov's Dog.  Now tie it all together!

What was once unacceptable is now the norm.  If you don't accept the "new norm" then you are ostracized and alienated. We used to be able to distinguish between good and bad, right and wrong, this group and that group.  Through our behaviors, language, and social groups we knew who was who and where we fit. Tattoos were for prisoners, military bikers and gangs. They were even discernible from one another.  Now they are an "artistic expression" with no defined rules or boundaries, no matter how offensive. The language of our society was more civilized and if we were to be inappropriate, we certainly looked around at whom we might offend.  Now? Families with kids, a bible study in the sand, no mater, let it fly. With traditional press and factual journalism displaced by the the internet, the language has permeated into what we read as news! Traditional family structures have broken down to a point of no return. We are apathetic and disconnected from one another.  I say none of this to pass judgment but to show that the way has been prepared for what's coming.

Now for the not-so-far-off future.  First, the adoption curve of any technologies, it takes emotions and values out of the equation. There are pioneers, early adopters, and mass adopters followed by obsolescence as we move onto the next great thing.  Think MySpace to Facebook, Yahoo to Google......

Let's only take Facebook to paint a small picture of the future.  If they are successful with Mind Speech and Tattoo identifiers then it may be introduced something like this: Technology is expensive in the beginning so it is usually the wealthy that get it first, and creates want, envy and desire further down the socioeconomic chain.  In this age of helicopter parenting, why wouldn't little Johnny get "enhanced" on his 5th birthday to prepare for kindergarten? It will connect him to the Internet of Things using IPV6 and 5G.  His whereabouts will always be known; he will be able to move about the house, school, clubs just by swiping his cute tattoo with the sensors and chips.  He will be smarter because he will always be connected to any subject, at any time, that is always just a thought away with Mind Search from Google.  He will have a competitive advantage over un-enhanced children and will have access to select, advanced schools because of it.  Heck, he will even be a status symbol as an enhanced child.  When he is older, his self driving car will interact with his personal AI to shuffle him to school, play dates, work, even his first date, all while being tracked by his parents who will get alerted on their smart phones if his digital assistant senses any deviation from agreed upon plans. His parents will curate his digital, physical and bio-metric profile to give him the best possible shot at USC and more importantly with future employers.

As the mass adopters wait for the price to come down, they will pine for this technology.  Be damned mark of the beast!  We are frogs and we are now cooked!

Usually, a piece like this serves as a wake up call with a clear call to action.  I don't have one.  I write for me to tie things together.  But, as I was writing this I was wondering if people knew what was actually happening.  We are not a free country, by any stretch.  We are tracked, monitored, sold, controlled, in such a perfect way that the vast majority have no idea.  Just thought I would bring it to life from a businessnologists perspective. I have worked with these technologies both with engineers where we discussed what could be, some day, and with the execs of what we would do with that power, if only.

As for me, I'm going sailing where the sea is what it always was, above the surface anyway.

The Internet is only good for Pornography and CHILD PORN!

Shocking Title? 

Let's try another......

Netscape is NOT THE Internet, IT doesn't take you anywhere?

And another....

Video will never be more than a postage sized, pixilated and choppy image on the internet, the bandwidth will Never support it and building it out is far to cost prohibitive.  How would you make money with video anyway????

And another.....

People will NEVER put their Credit Card numbers online!

And Serveral Others....

Amazon will always be Just a Bookstore if it survives

Studio Content will NEVER be online for fear of Piracy

The Internet will NEVER threaten the way the Music Industry works

Banks will NEVER fully go online because of security concerns

See where I am going with all of this? Riotous indignation for every technology innovation that began with a huge promise that also carried with it a huge threat to somebody, or some entrenched way of doing business, or earning money. I'll take them one at a time.....

The Internet

It was created by academia, for academia, and many believed that it should have stayed there because it opened a a free market of exchange for illicit things and ideas.  Nobody could see around a corner that had no reference point.  They couldn't say, "ah, it's like this thing or that thing....."  And because there was no reference point, the only thing that was visible was the threat that it posed to the status quo. We as a society all new that it was a giant thing but it was to big to conceive what it was or what the potential was.  What was obvious is how it could be used for evil, so the negative narrative began.

First let me tell you what the internet REALLY is/was.  I like to use the analogy of an iceberg.  Iceburgs are massive moving objects that are capable of bringing down the Titanic.  But it wasn't the pretty shiny tope that sank the unsinkable, it's what lied beneath!  Only 10% floats on the surface and it's pretty to look at and sanitized by nature. What's below is dark and destructive. The internet as you know it is the same.

In the beginning, there was no shiny top but there was a large, and growing exponentially, hidden internet.  It was only accessible by sophisticated users that knew how to get to it.  Then came AOL and they mailed a tiny, but shiny, top that amounted to a fraction of a fraction of one percent of what was actually out there.  This provided an easy entry to the World Wide Web that was all over the news and in the popular narrative as an evil thing that was dominated by pornography.  AOL was the Happy Days of the internet with nothing but Cunningham type people with Steve Case serving as Mr. Bosley.

The underbelly and dangerous stuff was still hidden from view.  Story time to decribe the real internet in those days. It was primarily text based and dominated by what's called "News Servers." There were News browsers that allowed you access to this content and most stuff was categorized by addresses like alt.mayfavorite.thing.that.I.want.to.read.about and picture sites would look something like alt.binaries.pictures.that.I.want.to.see......Basically, giant message forum where anybody could exchange stories or discussions on any topic or post pictures of their favorite things. Heaven forbid if you posted a useless picture or you would get lambasted for hogging precious internet bandwitch! The story will get dark below, from my own experience.

Then came Netscape!  The Browser provided a way to see the REAL internet, but still only a fraction of it.  The tip of the iceburg pierced the surface of the water but it was still tiny.  You had to know the exact IP address that you could type into the browser.  Then came DNS and the URL.  This made the the internet user friendly and available to the masses as a simple address that started with a WWW....... rather than a number i.e. 253.256.37.1

What was missing to bring more to the surface?  The search engine! Yahoo was born!  What began as a single guy catagorizing the web in his dorm room with a friendly web page to display it all in a Netscape browser, turned into an army of others doing the same.  A very intensive manual process that others tried to out do by building better, but equally as archaic, mousetraps e.g. Lycos, Alta Vista....Two Stanford computer science students changed that with Google. No longer labor intensive but automatic and accurate reflection and accessibility to the entire TIP of the iceberg!  And here we are!

Earthlink was born around this time frame and provided dial up access to the masses and combined with Netscape, friendly URLs and Yahoo, we began to see the real potential of the internet!  Anybody could create a website and every company was in a mad dash to put up a website.  Ideas sprouted through all of the menuer like weeds and money flowed like a faucet to anybody with an idea.  Business fundamentals went out the window and it was all about capturing eyeballs.  Hence the growth of Silicon Valley; Hence the .com boom/bust.  The shake out had to happen to purge the landscape and business fundamentals had to return.  What was left was companies like Amazon.com.  What was left behind was pets.com selling dog food online where the shipping costs were greater than the order itself.

We are in the late 1990's and the Internet has solidified itself into popular culture and business, even though we STILL had no idea what it was or where it was heading.  We just knew that it wasn't going away and that the world was in the midst of a paradigm shift never seen before in history.  Does that mean that the dark part, or the underbelly went away?  Nope!  It grew faster than the shiny iceberg top.  This is where we pick up the darker part of the story from above.

Like many others at the time, I was plucked out of business school to run one of these technology ventures.  It was an ISP what was born from a larger company that made it's business selling pagers, remember those?  But the CEO saw the writing on the wall so he was setting the company up for change.  I was brought in to manage that growth into uncharted territories.  I didn't try to create something that differentiated the company.  Rather, I took a look around and decided on the cheaper-faster-better-mousetrap strategy and set out to compete with Earthlink i.e.  Cheap dial up service, access to the internet and some basic web hosting services. We had a large advertising budget and we went after Earthlink's $15/mo with our own $7/mo offering. I'm a learn-by-doing kind of guy so I had to learn EVERYTHING about technology that the nascent industry required and the services that were in demand from the customers.  This is where it all comes full circle.  If you remember, AOL was $20 and limited your minutes on line.  You were constantly disconnected and the service was slow.  Our advertising worked and we switched over a LOT of people.  But now, without AOL, they would hear the air raid of the modem connecting, it would say that they were connected but they no longer heard "You Got Mail."  Now they had to open that Netscape thing and go to that Yahoo Place and type a thing into that address space.  We gave a lot of refunds to a lot of confused folks!

Here is the dark side that I promised.  The number one hosting request was for porn sites, which I refused to do. However, I quickly discovered that our programmers learned every tip and trick from the developers of those sites.  THEY were on the bleeding edge of what was possible so if you came to me with a resume of an engineer with that kind of experience, there was no moral battle.  They didn't consume the content and great computer code is just that, code. Eye opening.

 The demand for the news server was strong so I had to figure out how to do that since our customers needed a server to connect to.  I did that, and here where it got very dark and made me loose my faith in humanity.  Once that server was up and running for a month or so, I would run reports on which newsgroups were most requested because we were charged for every group we carried and, obviously, only wanted to carry the thousand or so that were being looked at with any frequency.  My first report came back and it was not what I expected.

al.binaries.pictures.pre-teen.xxxvideos
alt.binaries.pictures.pedophollia
al.binaries.pictures.underage.sex

and more, and more, and more......every iteration of child pornography request that you could imagine followed by every disgusting fetish, followed by every porn name iteration. Shocked and confused, to say the least.

So that's the beginning of the internet, that thing that you cannot live without, EVEN THOUGH is it by far the go-to method for sharing child pornography around the world, which encourages the PRODUCTION of the same! EVEN THOUGH it's genesis IS the dark web that has ALWAYS been used for illicit activities! Why? Because the societal good outweighs the bad!  Even the Dark web has significant benefits.  The Arab Spring would have never happened without it, China, North Korea and every other censored nation would not have access to the world outside the government firewalls with it.  I would tell you how to get there but your life would never be the same and I like you to much for that.

There is always a victim and a beneficiary of innovation.  Entrenched status quo leads to a consolidation of power, greed and corruption in every instance and in every business.  Technology has broken down entire industries and each had a negative narrative created by the victims but inevitably the benefits to the many outweighed the cost to the few. Think Music;  Think Circuit City.  Think Blockbuster; Think Online Banking.  Think movie making/distribution; Think long distance companies; Think Job Hunting. Think empty malls and neighborhood stores. I'm not against a wholesale swap-out to a simpler time where kids played outside but, we are too far down the slippery slope to turn back.  Now think of those industries that are yet to be disrupted or that are in the early stages.  They will, and always have, followed the five stages of grief and either adapt or ride that obsolescence curve where the only way is down.

Now that I have taken you through a lesson in history, you should have put yourself and your own thought process in various places along that time line. If not, answer these questions.....who is your long distance provider?  When was the last letter you sent? When is the last time your took your roll to a Kodak booth? How many stamps do you lick to pay your bills?  When was the last time you balanced your check book?  When was the last time you drove to rent a movie or even go to the theater? What news paper do you pick up from your driveway each morning? Change will happen whether you are an active participant or not.

Now the purpose of this write up.

I share because I care, not to brag.  I had nothing to do with the creation or promotion of the next revolutionary innovation that the world has ever seen.  I just see it and study it through the lens of history and to satisfy my own curiosities. Bitcoin, period, end of story, but probably not.

Remember these things first, victim and beneficiary; five stages of grief e.g. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.  And for good measure throw is a little FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt)

I will layout what bitcoin is, and isn't, in it's current form; the underlying blockchain technology, the direction its going and what the current narrative is and who is threatened.  All with the hopes that you will be smart enough not to be a part of it, but hear it, recognize it and place it where it belongs in the stages of grief or fud.

Bitcoin began as a global internet currency on a public ledger called the blockchain.  Think Napster and how hard it was to shut that down.  The songs lived on peoples computers in their dorm rooms or offices.  You downloaded bits and pieces from the songs from computers around the world and then the software put them back together into something that you could listen to.  However, their was a vulnerable point in the system that allowed it to get taken down, but not without changing the music industry forever.  The blockchain is similar, but not really.  Just think of computers around the world that have to talk to each other and agree upon that public ledger, and everyone has a copy of that too that is constantly synchronized.  Think of ledger entries as your checkbook where you enter debits and credits that go against and asset, your dollars in a bank.  The only one that needs to agree with you is the bank.  Now take the bank out of it. Your checkbook has to balance with the world and if it doesn't, you don't get to make the entry into the ledger.  This public ledger cannot be shut down and does not have any single point of failure.  It utilizes the same public cryptography that makes online banking, and any other critical infrastructure, safe to use today.  It is completely transparent and anybody in the world can see any transaction that has ever been cycled through it, but your identify is safe.  This is the blockchain.

Bitcoin began as a medium of exchange operating on top of this ledger so every single transaction in the 9 year history since the Genisis Block is recorded in the public ledge.  Anybody can use it, anywhere in the world, at anytime.  The value is determined by the same supply and demand rules as any other currency BUT, here is the beauty.  From it's inception, it has been mandated that only 21MM coins will ever be issued.  Unlike central banks that can print more money under the guise of quantitative easing. More on this later....

There are the two components.  Now here is the narrative and see if you can pick out the victims and identify where they are in the 5 stages or FUD.....

• It's all Just Fake Money
• It's A Fraud (Jaime Diamond, CEO JPMorgan)
• It Can Be Used By Drug Dealsers and Criminals (every politician in the world)
• It's currency for the Dark Web (government officials and every talking head)
• It's for money laundering (IRS, talking heads, government)
• Nothing Backing It (taking heads, government, banks)
• more, and more, and more,.......

Now the acceptance.......

• Blockchain is the thing that's interesting, not Bitcoin (Jaime Diamond, CEO JPMorgan)
• It's not a currency, it's an asset so it should be taxed as such even when used as a currency (IRS)
• It isn't going anywhere (Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Warren Buffet)
• We'll create our own bitcoin (Russia, China, Every major bank (walled gardens!)

Now the current state of affairs.

Bitcoin was envisioned as a form of digital currency when it was created in 2009 during the global financial crisis.  Calculated timing!  But it has moved into the gold category since, as a store of wealth given what's happened in the world.  It has become too valuable and expensive to spend so people just hold onto it. Because it's increasing in value so quickly? Some of that but really, NO.  Because people are afraid of their own governments ability to manage local currencies through central banks.  Think Greece where the private savings accounts were obfuscated by the government; Venezuela, Zimbabwe with it's Trillion Dollar notes of currency; South Korea Facing inhalation and citizens wanting to move their wealth out of the war zone; China and it's strict currency controls........  Because of this shift, many other coins are trying to fill the gap for quick transactions that share the same blockchain properties.  Bring in the ICO'c or Initial Coin Offerings.

You hear as part of the narrative that there are over a 1000 different crypto currencies.  Now go back to the beginning of the internet with Pets.com.  Most are useless and have no value whatsoever but money is flowing out of a new faucet and regulation has not caught up until recently.  When you hear countries are outright banning crypto currencies, these ancillary coins and further ICOs are what they are talking about, akin to the shake out of the .com.  Very much needed but they are not bitcoin.

Bitcoin itself has been under every attack imaginable from governments, press, prevailing narratives and even infighting. Still, it has proven resilient against it all as it just keeps hitting new highs.  We just went through a contentious technical in-fighting weeks ago and as of this writing, it is hitting all time higts into the mid 8000 range. If you look around, you will find price predictions for $1MM/coin by 2020 but I think 25K is more reasonable and attainable.

Now here is the thing, every technology has an adoption curve that starts with pioneers, early adopters and then broad acceptance until it crosses over the hump to the obsolescence down curve.  We are just in the early adopter stage but moving into the mass adoption phase.  This means that "smart money" from wall street is trying to come in and stake their claims.  Remember the 21MM .  To date, approximately 16.5MM coins have been released and as time goes on, the process for realeasing more coins get's more difficult, so value increases.  With such a small fraction of consumers holding digital wallets and with such a very small fraction of it's potential value realized, the price will continue to go up as we climb the adoption curve. Now it is possible for the average Joe to stake a claim that can grow with significance.  If the future, it may be cost prohibitive.  Which brings me to me next points.

When you see the price tag of $8000 for a single bitcoin, you may think cost prohibitive already.  That is not the case. Each bitcoin can be divided up into smaller increments, called Sitoshis, down to 0.00000001BTC.  That means you can buy very small increments. Currently, 1 Sitoshi = $.000082.  The fee to buy would be greater than the unit but you get what I mean.  And this leads me to a bit of advice for anybody reading this.

I benefit nothing whether you heed my advice or not but I introduced you to BTC at $200/coin!!!  Listen to the experts, it ain't going away.  You may be too old to change or you are independently wealthy and don't care for financial advice.  But your kids and grandkids aren't.  It costs you NOTHING to set up a a wallet, hardware or online.  Set one up, drop a few bucks in there and then come back in a month.  Drop $10/week in there and come back in a year and you will probably have new lighting for your living room.

My biggest wish for you is this.  It's is easy to parrot the narrative but now that you have been slightly educated, don't.  You will look as dumb as Briant Gumble and Katie on the today show in 1994.  Remember how video will never be on the internet, look it up on Youtube :p