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Block Telegraph Takes a Crack at Intelligent Blockchain and Cryptocurrency News 158 10364

Blockchain technology is moving at a breath-taking speed. Every day new projects are announced, new Initial Coin Offerings launched, updates released, tokens created, and new currencies unveiled. Even for the most die-hard enthusiasts, it’s hard to keep up with the news.

This is partially due to the speed of development, but also due to the disparate content channels in the crypto community. To remain informed, community members are supposed to subscribe to a plethora of Reddit forums, Slack channels, Telegram channels, Gitter channels, participate in the Bitcoin Forum (which deals with a much wider spectrum of projects than just Bitcoin), subscribe to a number of newsletters and monitor the web pages of major projects. And no serious crypto enthusiast can get away without following the key players on Twitter and monitoring important LinkedIn groups and company sites.

After getting all this information, there is some serious filtering to be done. It is not easy to separate the rumors from the real announcements and the vapourware from the solid projects. With all this going on, there is hardly any time at the end of the day to check the current state on one’s investment on CoinMarketCap. Let’s not even consider time for productive community contributions.

Block Telegraph – An Intelligent Crypto News Site

A new blockchain-focused news and background site is about to change this. BlockTelegraph.io, backed by the successful startup Hooch, provides up-to-date news on blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies with a focus on informative content about promising projects, crypto community activities, and future trends. The news content is combined with articles explaining key concepts and underlying technologies, as well as in-depth analysis of use cases and other important issues, such as Blockchain governance and regulatory issues and technology outlooks.

A Team of A-Class Writers

To achieve all this, Block Telegraph has built a versatile team of writers with different backgrounds. Hands-on technical skills and knowledge of the underlying cryptography and distributed systems theory are combined with industry-specific knowledge of different application domains. The writers’ educational backgrounds range from Ph.D. in Computer Science to Master in Arts. This ensures a wide range of topics and a combination of insights no single specialization can provide.

Solid Backing

Block Telegraph is backed by Hooch, a well-funded start-up that has recently secured $5 million in seed funding, in addition to $2.5 million obtained earlier. The core business of the company has grown from a drink-a-day subscription service to providing exclusive lifestyle experiences, such as travel and entertainment offerings, including hotel discounts, concerts, concierge services and much more.

Recently, the company has ventured into the blockchain space, announcing TapCoin. This new cryptographic token provides an in-app currency subscribers can use to obtain discounts and access to exclusive experiences and services. In exchange for awarding TapCoin tokens to users, experience providers obtain access to subscribers’ data and history, which allows them to tailor offers and experiences to their customers.

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Tina Mulqueen is the CEO of Kindred PR. She consults with reputable ICOs on marketing and public relations strategy, helping clients to secure more than $10M in funding. She was named one of the top young communications professionals by INC Magazine, and her campaigns have been featured in Adweek, Entrepreneur, INC and Forbes, in addition to multiple other niche and television outlets. She's an advocate for women in technology, and often speaks about the intersection of technology and retail marketing. She writes regularly for Forbes, and has written for Huffington Post, Today, Thrive Global, Elite Daily, New York Lifestyles Magazine, and more.

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Kenya Looks to Blockchain for Affordable Housing Project 1 143

Nairobi, Kenya

The “Silicon Savannah” is moving deeper in direction of tech. The Kenyan government has announced a plan to manage the property allocation and funding of 500,000 affordable housing units with blockchain technology.

The units, which the government aims to build by 2022, will be set aside for households with an annual income below 100,000 Kenyan Shillings, about $990 USD. The World Bank estimates Kenya’s gross national income per capita at $1,290, according to Business Daily.

Blockchain will help ensure that the affordable housing is in fact going to those who fall below the average income bracket. Land title fraud has caused problems for Kenyans, as land grabbers target homes and even schools for illegal sales and development. Blockchain’s ability to store verifiable proof of title could help safeguard against fraudsters.

“Kenya will use blockchain technology to ensure the rightful owners live in government funded housing projects,” said Principal Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Charles Hinga, speaking with the World Bank on Monday.

Hinga said the plan will be financed by the National Housing Fund, which will raise over $59.5 million per month to get the project underway. But Cabinet Secretary for Transport, Infrastructure, Housing and Urban Development James Macharia said it will take $31.7 billion to build a million homes, each of which will cost between $3,000 and $30,000. Macharia called for support from private sector financing.

Under the financing plan, working Kenyans will contribute 1.5 percent of their salary, which will be matched by their employers. “On affordable housing one should not spend more than 30% of their disposable income for housing,” Hinga tweeted yesterday. “Anything above 30% is not affordable.”

A Trustless Relationship Between People and Government

The initiative represents a considerable push to solve housing and title problems for the nation’s lower income families. But how will the government decide to whom the housing units will go? With so much talk about financing underway, people are already calling on the government to outline a plan for how they’ll distribute the affordable housing units.

The government will need to deliver the housing projects in a time when, Hinga acknowledges, the public is skeptical. Earlier this year $78 million went missing in a corruption scandal involving the National Youth Services. Where there is little trust between the people and their government, Kenya hopes to establish transparency through the blockchain’s distributed ledger system.

Kenya’s Move Toward Tech

In March, Kenya’s Ministry of Information, Communications and Technology appointed a blockchain taskforce to explore the ways the nation could use blockchain technology in the public and private sectors. They called it the Distributed Ledgers and Artificial Intelligence taskforce, and by September its chairman, Bitange Ndemo, was calling on the government to tokenize the economy.

Ndemo also proposed government implementation of blockchain to certify the authenticity of retail goods, so consumers can be sure of where their food is coming from, for example.

Governor of Kenya’s central bank Patrick Njoroge has also voiced support for the use of blockchain technology to strengthen service delivery, although he’s opposed the use of tokens and digital currencies.

But the affordable housing initiative could be the Kenyan government’s first real world implementation of the blockchain.

There’s an Inflatable ‘Bitcoin Rat’ Staring Down the Fed 1 126

Someone has put a giant inflatable rat outside the Federal Reserve Bank in New York.

It’s covered in Bitcoin code, printed in rainbow colors, and is apparently a piece of installation art aimed at subverting the federal institution that controls the US dollar. Or is it pale, puffed-up pariah a commentary on Bitcoin bros themselves? Or does it have something to do with Warren Buffett, who earlier this year called Bitcoin “rat poison squared”? According to CoinDesk, who first reported on the inflatable rat, the meaning is intentionally ambiguous.

The artist behind the puzzling prank is Nelson Saiers. He describes his own work as “mystifying” and “singularly original”, notwithstanding the long history of rats being inflated as protests or used as economic and political icons in art and entertainment around the world.

“It’s art, so I hope they’re entertained by it,” he said, apparently implying that art is entertainment. “It’s informative, I hope people will learn [and] I’m hoping it’ll at least help people understand bitcoin better and be kind of faithful to what Satoshi would have wanted,” he added, citing the mysterious pseudonym of Bitcoin’s founder with a touch of reverence.

A $50 Million Artist

Saiers, a phD in theoretical mathematics, was a hedge fund manager who did that thing where you give up all the money to chase your dream of being an artist.

His financial experience includes a stint as managing director at Deutsche Bank’s prop trading desk, before becoming CIO of Saiers Capital, the hedge fund that bears his name. His creative career gives credence to the theory that working as an artist is more and more a privilege of the very wealthy.

CNBC estimated Saiers’s wealth to be around $50 million at the time of he departed from the financial industry to pick up his paintbrushes.

The Rat Joins a Tradition of Sculpture-as-Commentary in FiDi

The Bitcoin rat, which stands on Maiden Lane, isn’t the first pop up sculpture to grace Manhattan’s financial district. Last year, Kristen Visbal’s 50 inch bronze ‘Fearless Girl’ statue made waves by staring down the famous ‘Charging Bull’, to the outrage of ‘Charging Bull’ sculptor Arturo Di Modica. The 3.5 ton ‘Charging Bull’ itself was left on Wall Street in the middle of the night when Di Modica originally created it, obstructing traffic and drawing the curiosity of passers by.

When Saiers placed the Bitcoin rat, he initially set it up on private property and was promptly ushered off by security guards, who he says were good natured about the situation. He expects the sculpture to be more temporary than the aforementioned Wall Street bronzes, and will probably only be around for a few days.

A Critique of the 2008 Bailouts

The placement of the rat on Maiden Lane seems to be no accident, but rather a reference to the Maiden Lane Transactions, more commonly known as that time when the Fed bailed out the big banks after they all caused the 2008 market crash. The Bitcoin crowd’s antipathy towards the Fed and the big banks is palpable in Sairs’s rat sculpture, and while a more specific meaning eludes, perhaps the success of the piece depends upon its ability to start conversations about the state of finance.

We’ll leave it to the viewers to decide who’s the rat—the Federal Reserve, or Bitcoin itself—and what that means for the future of currencies.

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