Quite possibly the boldest project in both sports and blockchain technology today - the Fan Controlled Football League (FCFL).

At first glance, I thought I was reading about an new fantasy league, or video game - but this will be done with real players, on a real field - with the fans calling the shots.

Everything handed over to the control of the masses - from the hiring and firing of players and coaches, and then calling the plays during the game!

"We’re building a real-life video game. That’s really what the FCFL is, a real-life version of Madden for fans to kind of run and control a real team. So in Madden and every other mobile game and video game people have ever played you collect points or gems or gold — all of these digital things where you’re kind of trying to earn more and with those things you can do more in the game.” says Schrob Farudi, founder and CEO of the FCFL.

The league will consist of 10 teams, and instead of taking place in a traditional stadium setting, it all takes place in a fully decked out production studio indoor field. This allows for an experience that revolves around the home viewer.  There will still be a smaller live audience, 500 to 1000 people.

But for those at home a truely futuristic viewing experience.  The indoor studio envitonment allows for them to produce a show using all modern technology - chipped footballs, biometrics, helment cams and drones.

The next thing I thought was - can they actually pull this off? Well, they already are! They've already spent $2 million dollars putting together the first team, building the studio, and developing the software - things are moving forward for a real Summer 2018 launch of the league!

The test runs caught the eyes of both Sports Illustrated, and Twitch, which are now partners in the project.

So for those of us in the cryptocurency world, the only question is: how do tokens come into play?

The currency is called 'FAN' and is an Ethereum ERC20 based token. Fans can of course buy tokens, or earn them by watching games and interacting - the more tokens you hold the more weight your opinion holds. The more you win the more you earn, and the championship pay-off for the first season is $1 Million dollars, paid out in FAN tokens and split between players, coaches, and the fans who helped call the shots.

Football is just the beginning - the company aims to expand their platform to other sports like soccer, baseball, cricket, and more.

More info on the FCFL and their ICO can be found at https://fcfl.io

KFC in Canada has launched what they're calling the "Bitcoin Bucket" in a Facebook post saying:

"KFC Canada presents The Bitcoin Bucket. Sure, we don’t know exactly what Bitcoins are, or how they work, but that shouldn’t come between you and some finger lickin’ good chicken"

The purchases are done though BitPay, the bucket cost $20 and can only be used when ordering delivery online.

KFC also said they may expand to accept other cryptocurrencies, and in a tweet said:

"We only sell in #Bitcoin right now. Other crypto coins in consideration."

We've been predicting this for awhile - 2018 is the year crypto goes mainstream!

South Korea has played a major role in the cryptocurrency boom that often goes unnoticed to those of us on the English speaking side of things. 

They have their own corner of the crypto world - with their own forums, chat rooms and their own exchanges - where prices can even vary greatly from US/EU exchange rates.

But nonetheless - the volume of money they bring in effects us all. They account for about 15% of the entire market.

Today however, our crypto friends in South Korea are in a panic.  Yesterday their justice minister, Park Sang-ki announced "regulators are preparing legislation to halt cryptocurrency trading" that sent the markets into a nose dive.

So why are their politicians looking to crack down?  It appears what first drew government attention is lack security at two South Korean exchanges.

First, there was the Bithumb hack in July - over 30,000 victims losing their Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Then came YoBit, forced to shut down after suffering two major attacks in one year.

Throw in your standard "it's a bubble" fears on top of these - and we get some very worried politicians.

But democracy, and South Korean politicians fearing backlash at the voting booths may save cryptocurrency trading in the nation.  Chief security strategist at AsTech, a cyber security firm explained to Infosecurity Mag:

“This ban, though, would impact a growing number of citizens and could cause a huge backlash against the government, both immediately and in any voting situation. At this point, it may be too early to guess at what a ban on cryptocurrency trading would do to South Korea, either economically or politically, but as the number of South Koreans who use cryptocurrencies increases, this issue will become more challenging to address at a national level.”

With youth unemployment rates 3x higher than the national average, playing the cryptocurrency markets has taken the place of a job for many young South Koreans.

As of today, an online petition against the proposed ban has over 120,000 signatures - and even crashed the website earlier.

So, that's where things stand now, we're watching closely for future developments. 

After a flood of new users in the cryptocurrency wave of 2017, existing customers began complaining about downtime and server issues on the top rated exchange, Binance.

Now after expanding their network capabilities, Binance.com has re-opened to new users.

But get in while you can, they're limiting the amount of new signups each day.  If you can't now, try again tomorrow.  "Demand is so high that the company is limiting new customers" the CEO told Bloomberg on Wednesday.

Visit Binance at https://www.Binance.com

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