While lately the only news linking blockchain technology to the topic of energy has been negative, it turns out - blockchain may end up being the solution to the world's energy problems.

The controversy revolves around the amount of power consumed in the process of mining cryptocurrencies. Both Digiconomist and Zero Hedge released papers stating that within the next 3 years, cryptocurrency mining alone would need to use the amount of power the entire world uses by 2020, and already uses as much power as Denmark.

Without going too much into it, since that's not the point of this piece - let me say this has largely been an uneducated media that will repeat anything negative they can get their hands on. They used highly disputed data, as mining rigs can vary greatly in power consumption their estimates may be as much as 3x off, and when it comes to the carbon footprint they claim mining leaves - they used the worst power source in their calculations - Chinese coal.

I bring this up because what's better than making the case "No, cryptocurrencies aren't as bad for the environment as they say"?

Being able to say they're also the solution!

Companies like WePower are leveraging the excitement behind blockchain and cryptocurrencies to put green energy production into overdrive. Putting together a team of energy experts, governments, engineers, and investors together to make it happen.

A huge reason green energy production outlets haven't popped up everywhere is simply how out of reach it feels to the average investor. How do you find them? What will you get in return? Then - how does a company wanting to build one small green energy plant for their local town or city find the investors?

Well, a marketplace and a token tied to smart contracts stating it's value is equal to 1 token for 1 killowatt hour of energy solves this. A green energy producer utilizing solar, wind, water power can gain access to the capital needed selling their future energy upfront - by tokenizing it.

“Currently if you want to finance a set of renewable energy plants, either you have to go to a bank and take on debt, or you go to an investor and issue securities. In our solution, producers are selling energy upfront in the form of a token.” says WePower co-founder Arturas Asakavicius.

WePower is already lining up their partners for launch.  They claim to have 1 gigawatt of power already reserved for the project lined up with 3 solar power producers in Spain. Intitally they're targeting larger, established energy producers, but the long term road map includes the average person with solar panels on their home's roof being able to put their excess power out onto the market and earn tokens themselves.

“The end goal is to produce a true peer to peer energy platform, where people would sell renewable energy and also be able to get energy back from the grid.” says Nick Martyniuk, another one of the company founders.

WePower's ICO begins in February and can be found online at https://wepower.network

With cryptocurrency in the spotlight and a media that loves to push doom and gloom, Warren Buffett's comments today are being picked up and shared by virtually every mainstream and financial news outlet.

For those who don't know, Warren Buffett is one of the most successful investors on the planet and he's made billions doing it.  In 2008 he was the "richest person in the world" - so understand we're not calling him stupid, that's not the point here.

Today speaking to CNBC's "Squawk Box" he said on the topic of cryptocurrencies:

"I can say with almost certainty that they will come to a bad ending."

But we do think some perspective is needed when someone like him speaks on cryptocurrencies, or tech in general.

Buffett made his billions in in old school industries and traditional finance - coal, tobacco, Coca Cola, Heinz, Bank Of America... you get the idea.

On technology, he's the first to admit - it's not his area of expertise.

When asked why he missed out on Amazon, his response was "I was too dumb".  When asked why he hadn't invested in Google - "I blew it" said Buffett.

Buffett is a genius, when it comes to the things he's a genius on. Technology isn't one of them. 

In fact, history tells us, if it's tech and Buffett doesn't believe in it - a bright future is ahead.

Back in September 2017 Dimon angered the cryptocurrency world by calling bitcoin a "fraud" and said "if you're stupid enough to buy it, you'll pay the price for it one day,"

Regarding those comments now - he says "I regret making them" in an interview on Fox Business.

But Dimon wasn't all cheer about Bitcoin, and also added he worries about how "governments are going to feel about bitcoin when it gets really big." To be fair, a concern shared even by Bitcoin lovers.

Dimon's earlier comments had seemed to be at odds with his own company for months.  In October JP Morgan Chase announced they would be using blockchain technology to speed up their global payments in a project called "Interbank Information Network" and said the tech would increase the speed of these transactions "from weeks to hours."

It seems Dimon is becoming a believer, slowly.

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Maybe it's because it's DOGE, and everyone just laughed it off.  But for the first time, John McAfee tweeted his coin choice, and the market didn't react... at all.

It's been a strange road to this point.  First, McAfee started his "coin of the day" tweets - but that went to hell fast.  People even coded bots to automatically buy (pump) and sell (dump) based on what was being tweeted out.

That caused some backlash and McAfee announced the "coin of the day" would become the "coin of the week" (article about that here).

So, this week's coin of the week?

Coin of the week: DOGE

— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) January 8, 2018

The market's reaction?

 

No noticeable difference.   Please tell me this can be over with now?

John McAfee is best known for creating the worlds first commercial antivirus software, but left the company he founded in 1994 and has since been involved in mobile apps, alternative medicine, and cryptocurrencies.

Imagine a second version of our planet, another layer if you will where things exist in an augmented reality, on top of our physical world.

Pokemon Go is about as much as the average person may have seen so far of this concept, but Arcona hopes to take this further - way further.

Entire virtual cities built on top of the physical ones we already have. The technology to do it already exists in products like Microsoft's HoloLens and others, and theme parks like Universal Studios and Disney locations are beginning to implement AR into their features, introducing high-end AR to a large audience.

So - this revolution is happening - that's not the question.  The question is: besides multi-million dollar companies creating AR for use in their domains, how can smaller developers, and businesses take part in the AR revolution? What kind of ecosystem can this exist in?

Behold Arcona. A unified platform that will allow developers do buy, hold, and develop AR features on their own land. Picture that park down the street, now imagine buying it in Arcon's virtual world, and being able to develop things on this land that suddenly appear to anyone who puts on an AR headset.

You own this land in the AR world - so your local park could become "Dinosoar park" (lol, wouldn't want to infringe any copyrights but you get what i'm saying).  Now, parents could bring their kids, and their AR headsets and see a T-Rex right in front of them - and since it's all virtual, you can charge an entrence fee!

This is where a token based ecosystem comes in. Users of the Arcona platform will need to spend in a virtual world where you can't hand someone cash, so using a cryptocurrency just makes sense. The use of smart contracts will protect things like land rights, copyright and payments.

Arcon's vision has caught the attention of companies like Google - and they were even awarded a Microsoft Seed Fund Grant.

You can learn more, read their whitepaper, and take part in their ICO which is live now at https://www.arcona.io

A new exchange launching soon and promising 99.999% uptime, strong security and a large variety of coins.  They're called UPCoin and part of their pre-launch promotion they are offering a $500 credit to new users.

Check them out at www.UpCoin.com

Will it meet the hype? We'll see, but if it turns out to be decent the credit could come in handy.

China is home to the largest Bitcoin mining operations in the world.  Electricity, the most expensive part of mining is incredibly cheap there, and the hardware needed to do it is manufactured there as well - so it costs less to buy those "made in China" electronics when you're already there.

People’s Bank of China announced plans this week to begin to "enforce local regulators to monitor and even restrict the power use of miners".

While there's been rumors of such actions before - this time it seems like the real deal.

Bitmain is one of these massive mining operations in China - and they have publicly confirmed a plan to "shift operations" to Singapore as a result of these new regulations.

The good news - China said they will allow miners some time to slowly close down their operations, so it won't seem like someone suddenly pulled the plug.  This means the average Bitcoin user probably won't be effected or even notice it happening.

Miners say they're looking at Iceland, Canada and the USA as top potential spots to relocate as the supply of cheaper renewable energy grows in these nations.

This is the latest in what's been an odd year of Chinese regulation - banning ICO's and some exchanges preceded this latest move.

A day after the Bitconnect scam was served a cease and desist (full story here) the second most popular crypto scam "USI Tech" has terminated it's USA and Canadian members.

In a laughable move - they're actually blaming their own users for their troubles. Now making the case that even though their entire system functioned off people spamming and referring others - it's the users fault for sharing the links they provided.  Stating in an e-mail shared on Reddit:

We were utterly dismayed to learn that a large number of our sales partners extensively advertise our services on their own websites as well as on social media in a manner which is a breach of contract as well as illegal, and which gives the appearance that our service portfolio violates both US and Canadian law. Despite the measures which we have already initiated, this behavior has even intensified in recent weeks and months. This has already resulted in actions by the respective authorities against various distributors, as well as the first preliminary injunctions in response to this advertising behavior. 

This seems to be the beginning of the end for multiple crypto scam sites that targeted the wave of new uneducated investors.

Experts expect the Federal government of the USA to review the Texas securities board's findings and implement a nationwide ban on Bitconnect in the coming weeks, that is if Bitconnect doesn't ban them first.

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Bitconnect is a scam that's been plaguing the cryptocurrency world for the last few months.

Today, government officials in Texas have ordered them to halt activity immediately - citing fraud, and knowingly misleading the public.

There's been others with the same fraudulent business model, but none have grown to the size of Bitconnect, which launched with perfect timing, just when cryptocurrencies exploded over the last year.

Everything about Bitconnect is made to fool people new to cryptocurrencies - if you're lucky, you probably never heard of it. But if you're in some of the social network corners filled with new crypto investors, you can't avoid the endless spam. Mainly on YouTube and Facebook.

In a nutshell - they get these ignorant people to believe they have a bot that will trade cryptocurrencies automatically, and if they loan money to that bot, they'll receive a return on their loan.

They are rewarded in the form of a totally useless cryptocurrency called "BCC".  Which looks just legit enough to fool someone who doesn't know what they're doing.

They point out that the coin is listed on "multiple exchanges". What they don't tell people is - those exchanges are the ones that accept any coin submitted, and even then - nobody wants BCC on them.  There's zero demand for the BCC coin outside of BCC's own website.  Legitimate exchanges have openly refused to hold the BCC coin.

So they have all their victims on their own exchange, bidding against each other and raising the price on a coin no one else in the world wants.  What happens if a lot of people want to turn BCC coins into cash all at once? It all comes crashing down - because there's not enough buyers if there's ever a lot of sellers. That's how this ponzi scheme eventually collapses.

So far Bitconnect has been able to pay people cashing out with new money coming in.  But their growth has already begun to slow, and many YouTuber's who made a killing referring others to the scam are now saying they've taken their money out before the full collapse happens. Warning their followers before they have a lot of people angry at them.

Even worse - the entire 'company' is set up to disappear into thin air.  At first their site was an obvious scam - horribly written broken English - you could tell this was a 3rd world operation. Since then they've cleaned it up and made it look as legitimate as possible.

However - whoever registered their business later in the UK, apparently forgot their own birth date -  it doesn't match from one form to another. The name leads to no real person.

Their office addresses? All places anyone can rent a work desk at for a day, for traveling businessmen. One YouTuber tried to call every Bitconnect "office" - no one at any of them ever heard of the company. You can listen to those calls here. 

Today, the state of Texas which is expected to be the first of many, filed an emergency cease and desist.  Stating they violated at least 3 state regulations - as well as crimes of "engaging in fraud" and statements "likely to deceive the public".

The full legal documents can be viewed here.

The Ethereum Foundation is a non-profit group that helps oversee, and develop the future of Ethereum.

In a blog post by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, he stated why he's trying to help fuel innovation, stating:

"With the Ethereum blockchain reaching 1 million transactions per day, and both Ethereum and other blockchain projects frequently reaching their full transaction capacity, the need for scaling progress is becoming more and more clear and urgent."

So through a series of grants from $50,000 and up to $1 million - The Ethereum Foundation is trying to help bring solutions to these scaling issues, fast.

They invite anyone, any company, any development team, or even university to apply if they feel they can contribute.

You can get full details here.