Blockchain and Cryptocurrency
With over 15 years experience in the Blockchain industry, we are here to solve all your business Blockchain needs.
Blockchain is a cryptographic method whereby all transactions are clearly and immutably entered into a series of computations which cannot be altered.
Blockchain is often utilized to track product and inventory. For example, Walmart knows every detail about a head of lettuce, from who picked it, until it is sold retail in the store produce section. Such a system can track inventory, shrinkage, freshness, and it makes recall of a contaminated product simple. Another use we have developed involves parts and maintenance of aircraft. Every single part on an airplane is numbered so as to trace flaws or fatigue. This same concept applies to personnel scheduling.
Explained by famed economist Dr. Richard Rahn in his groundbreaking book, “The End of Money”, a public/ private key encryption system evolved in a few short years into what is commonly called “Cryptocurrency” movement of financial transactions.
Most consumers are familiar with the name of the first major usage of this system, called Bitcoin. While still the largest and most well know cryptocurrency, Bitcoin is hampered by the fact , at it’s core, the purchase of a Bitcoin is a totally speculative purchase. It is not backed by fiat national currency, real estate, gold, or any tangible product. As well, it continually floats in value. Thus Bitcoin is seldom used for serious monetary transmissions, and is more of a speculative, gambling novelty.
Despite the opposition of authoritarian governments, including the United States Treasury and SEC, the true potential of crypto is centered on “stablecoin” systems. With stablecoin products, the coins are 100% backed by a national currency, such as a Euro. The holder of the coin is guaranteed immediate, 100% conversion of the stable coin back into fiat. This allows a person to buy, hold, save, remit and otherwise use their “value”. This P to P (Person to Person, or business) movement allows the instantaneous settlement of payment, whether to your relative in overseas, your sister for her birthday, or buying heavy machinery from Japan. It is truly instantaneous (electronic) cash.
We have helped one client develop a stablecoin which replaces, or overlays is perhaps the better word, 33 traditional banking, cash, and monetary services, from cashiers checks, money orders, to simple bill paying, all in the privacy and security of your own home. Your transactions are anonymous and private, as was intended by the fourth amendment to the United States Constitution; and safe, as no longer does a small business or individual have to fear robbery.
That Time Donald Trump Walked Into a Bar and Bought a Round Using Bitcoin
Republican presidential nominee made unusual campaign stop in New York, seeking to further bolster his support from crypto fan
By :
Alex Leary
Vicky Gr Huang
Former President Donald Trump made a campaign stop at crypto-themed bar PubKey in New York on Wednesday. Photo: Alex Brandon/AP
NEW YORK—A former president walks into a dive bar and asks, “Who wants a hamburger?” He pulls out an iPhone and pays not with dollars but with bitcoin.
“History in the making,” Donald Trump declared Wednesday after making the transaction at PubKey, a Greenwich Village tavern that is the it spot for crypto enthusiasts—a rising financial and political force that Trump is hoping will help him return to the White House.
The Founding Fathers had Fraunces Tavern, the Manhattan saloon where George Washington closed out a successful war against the Brits. Trump has PubKey.
“PubKey is the drinking hole for the bitcoin revolution. He’s now one of us,” said Mike Germano, president of Bitcoin Magazine. Germano, 42, a former Democrat who plans to vote for Trump in November, had a prime viewing position for the visit.
Thomas Pacchia, co-founder of PubKey Photo: Alex Leary/WSJ
“It’s a significant step in bitcoin history. It’s more than a currency, it’s a movement,” said PubKey co-founder Andrew Newman, 40, whose bar features a $12 beer-and-shot special.
Trump once said bitcoin seemed like a scam, but he has embraced the industry, appearing at a recent conference in Nashville and raking in millions of dollars in campaign contributions made in cryptocurrencies as he promised a more favorable regulatory climate if he wins a second term.
“Almost everyone starts out as a skeptic,” said Thomas Pacchia, 40, the hat wearing, lightly bearded co-founder of PubKey whose aesthetic could be described as dive-bar chic. “But when you do the work and dive into the protocol, you start to understand the really elegant mechanisms around decentralization, the way mining works, the way that transactions are effectuated. It’s not an easy technology to grasp. It just takes time.”After making his bitcoin payment Wednesday, Trump said it went quick and “beautifully.” He paid roughly $950 in bitcoin for smash burgers and Diet Cokes.
Invited guests were brimming with excitement when the teetotaling 78-year-old Trump stepped into the cramped New York dive bar. Red hats read, “Make Bitcoin Great Again,” and on the wall, near an old-school boombox and a bank of cassettes, was a digital ticker displaying the current value of one bitcoin. A sign on the wall warned, “Central bank digital currencies enslave.” Trump has also pledged to halt any work on central bank digital currencies if he is re-elected in November.
“I’m shocked to see anybody here, to be honest. I thought all New Yorkers hated him,” said a self-described politically agnostic East Village resident who declined to give his name, not wanting to further alienate his wife—a Trump supporter—from her Trump-loathing friends.
T-shirts being passed around reminded Trump of a campaign promise he’s made: “Free Ross Day One,” a reference to Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 for running the online drug bazaar. Ulbricht has become a symbol among libertarians and crypto fanatics of government overreach.
Trump paid roughly $950 in bitcoin for smash burgers and Diet Cokes at the event. Photo: Alex Brandon/Associated Press
They’ve been treating you very badly at the SEC,” Trump said in the bar, referring to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s crackdown on the crypto industry. At the bitcoin conference, Trump said he would fire SEC Chair Gary Gensler on his first day back at the White House, a promise that was met with thunderous applause. And just this week he launched a crypto project with his elder sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.
The former president has told crowds at conferences and events that he wants to make the U.S. the “world capital for crypto and bitcoin.” Trump promised the creation of a “strategic national bitcoin stockpile” and the establishment of a bitcoin and crypto presidential advisory council.
Some attendees at the PubKey event appeared to be bitcoin maximalists, crypto slang for people who view bitcoin as the best and most important cryptocurrency. Germano corrected Trump when he called the burgers he paid for “crypto burgers.”
“It’s a bitcoin burger,” Germano shouted, referring to the $17 handheld that comes standard with pub sauce, lettuce, onion, tomato and cheese.
Trump didn’t seem fazed by the difference. “Everybody, whether it’s bitcoin or crypto, get out and vote, because if you vote, we cannot lose,” he said.
After Trump left, a group of enthusiasts gathered in the back of PubKey to hear a venture capital bitcoin pitch. Fans of the bar spread word that detractors were filling online sites with negative reviews. A man with a whiskey pulled out his phone and typed out a five-star review. The guy next to him did the same.
Write to Alex Leary at alex.leary@wsj.com and Vicky Ge Huang at vicky.huang@wsj.com
Bitcoin, Burgers and Big-Money Donors: Inside the Trump Crypto Alliance
The former president’s embrace of digital currencies is drawing fervent support from a niche he once scorned
Donald Trump this week pivoted to embrace a niche constituency that few would have expected him to champion—cryptocurrencies and the deep-pocketed investors who have made them their domain.
The former president and onetime bitcoin skeptic on Monday helped launch a new crypto business with his family. On Wednesday, he bought a round of burgers for denizens of a bitcoin-theme dive bar in New York. Pledges to block a Federal Reserve-backed digital currency and establish a “strategic national bitcoin stockpile” stand out in stump speeches that mostly focus on such center-of-the-plate political issues as immigration and trade.
All of this has won him fervent support from a growing subset of single-issue voters—and wealthy donors—who say the government’s treatment of cryptocurrency will determine how they pull the lever on Election Day.
An industry often at odds with government has been invigorated by having a potential champion in the White House, said Dennis Porter, chief executive officer of Satoshi Action Fund, a bitcoin-backing nonprofit.
The talk quickly turned to a shared dislike of Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, whose aggressive enforcement agenda has made him something of a boogeyman for crypto companies.
“We all sort of agreed that Gensler is like in that movie ‘A Quiet Place,’” said Traina. “If you make a sound, he sues.”
That month, Trump also hosted about a dozen executives from the bitcoin-mining industry—which uses computers to generate random numbers in the hopes of unlocking fresh bitcoin—at his Mar-a-Lago resort. Over sodas and macadamia cookies, Trump asked the executives about the energy consumption needs of bitcoin mining and told them his campaign would develop friendly talking points about the industry in the coming months.
“He actually made the statement that he would like nothing more than to see all of the remaining bitcoin mined in the U.S.,” said Matthew Schultz, executive chairman of the bitcoin miner CleanSpark, who attended the event.
A Wall Street linkup
Trump’s embrace of crypto has found its purest form in his appointment of Howard Lutnick, chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, as a co-chair of his transition team. By handing the position to his longtime friend and fundraiser Lutnick, Trump gives the crypto industry’s biggest cheerleader on Wall Street a potentially powerful role.
Before Lutnick’s appointment, both men spoke at a late July bitcoin conference in Nashville, Tenn.
“The rules will be written by people who love your industry, not hate your industry,” Trump said in his speech.
Lutnick regaled the audience with Cantor’s crypto bona fides, established as he has pushed Cantor deeper into the industry since 2020. The company now owns “a shedload of bitcoin,” Lutnick said, and announced that the company was opening a $2 billion facility to lend against bitcoin collateral.
Lutnick also has tied Cantor to Tether, one of the largest and most profitable companies in crypto. Tether’s main product is the world’s most-used stablecoin, also called tether, which essentially functions as an unregulated digital dollar with $119 billion in circulation. Cantor manages Tether’s portfolio of U.S. Treasurys.
Tr
Trump’s crypto-related promises often have direct effects on these backers. A “strategic national bitcoin stockpile” of the kind that Trump has proposed would legitimize bitcoin as a reserve asset. His promise to block a Fed-issued digital currency would potentially keep a powerful competitor to Tether out of the market.
Some investors and analysts view Trump’s candidacy as being generally positive for crypto prices more broadly, even beyond his efforts to woo the digital-currency crowd. Because of the candidate’s habit of making comments that seem aimed at rattling the status quo, a Trump presidency is widely regarded on Wall Street as being likely to lead to greater volatility in all asset classes—an environment that has been good for bitcoin in the past.
At the conference, Trump also reiterated a pledge to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht. Using the alias “Dread Pirate Roberts,” he created and ran the crypto-fueled Silk Road online drug marketplace before being sentenced to life imprisonment on federal drug and computer crime charges.
Not a fan of the SEC chair
But Trump’s most popular crypto-wooing pledge is his promise to remove Gensler from atop the SEC.
In their podcast, which was recorded before Trump’s pledge, Andreessen and Horowitz complained that Gensler has refused to meet with them on several occasions, despite their firm’s being among the biggest investors in cryptocurrency. Powell’s Kraken has been locked in legal combat with the regulator, having been charged by the agency with breaking securities laws and separately paying a $30 million settlement to the SEC.
“The U.S. securities laws have worked to protect investors for 90 years, and there’s nothing incompatible about the crypto field with these time-tested laws,” a spokeswoman for the SEC said.
Trump’s pledge to fire Gensler on his first day in office was met with such thunderous applause and loud cheers from the audience at the bitcoin conference that he repeated the promise.
“I didn’t know he was that unpopular. Let me say it again,” he said. “On day one, I will fire Gary Gensler.”
Crypto is one of those things we have to do’
Trump’s tendency to entwine his business interests and political career also has taken a crypto turn.
Trump has launched and sold four collections of nonfungible tokens—crypto’s version of digital trading cards—to his supporters since 2022.
His latest crypto business venture, World Liberty Financial, launched with much fanfare Monday evening, through a two-hour livestream featuring Trump and his family on Elon Musk’s X platform.
The project, which said it wants to “make crypto and America great by driving the mass adoption of stablecoins and decentralized finance,” has shared few details about its mechanics so far. The team behind the project said it would sell and distribute a token to wealthy investors who meet certain income and net worth criteria.
Trump, World Liberty’s so-called chief crypto advocate, didn’t address the project directly during his 40-minute interview on the stream. Some of his speech focused on a second apparent assassination attempt foiled the day before, when a gunman was arrested after lying in wait at the Mar-a-Lago golf course. At the time, Trump was golfing with Steve Witkoff, one of World Liberty’s backers.