Bitcoin plus bottled water
The surge in popularity has led cutting-edge consumers to find it easier than ever to use Bitcoin to buy goods and services. However, until today, no advertising agency network was brave enough to accept Bitcoin. DiMassimo Goldstein has a history of anticipating and inserting itself into burgeoning trends in business and culture before any other agency.
Founded as a hybrid digital and traditional agency in , DIGO Brands quickly became the agency for several iconic Internet and e-commerce businesses in the first dot-com boom. DiMassimo Goldstein recognized upcoming consumer backlash against the waste created by the bottled water industry when it successfully launched the Tappening movement, as well as a growing demand in our society to tune out the high volume of digital noise with its Offlining movement.
Both efforts were far ahead of their time and are now emulated and included in major advertising campaigns today.
Experiments such as launching our own movements Tappening and Offlining taught us social and movement marketing from the inside, without spending a single client dollar.
This experiment will help us learn for our clients, too. DIGO Brands has extensive experience working with and launching campaigns for new and currently leading payment systems including airline miles, credit cards, payment processing systems such as MasterCard and innovative, non-traditional platforms such as Revolution Money, now owned by American Express. Early experiments are essential to our intimate understanding of new media and business models. Accepting Bitcoin continues that trend.
According to you, what is the best way to secure your wallet during the transformation phase like a hard forks? Is the use of hardware wallet recommended? Are they worth the investment? It all depends on how far you want to go into storing cryptocurrencies.
If you want to store up-to Rupees one lakh worth of cryptocurrencies, then I would not suggest you to go for a hardware wallet. But If you are really interested in investing lot of money in this area, then hardware wallet is a must have option because only hardware wallet will ensure that your money remains safe.
Bitcoin blockchain comprises of two segments, technological segment and political segment. There are lots of proposals which are in the stage of evolution, but only having a technological proposition is not enough, because, at the end of the day, this technological proposition has to be accepted by the mining community and all other stake holders of bitcoin community.
Once technological proposition and political proposition is merged into one, they are accepted. Segwit2x is about to happen next month. Only those technological proposals will be going ahead where the committee is in consensus.
Not only Segwit2x, there are more proposals like Schnorr signatures, where secrecy can be enhanced a lot; secrecy of users, particularly the privacy features. There are some things which are inside the bitcoin community while there are others outside the bitcoin community. In this project they are creating a private blockchain in parallel to bitcoin blockchain and they will connect these two blockchains through a multi-sig wallet which means after every 10 minutes, or 60 minutes or 24 hours, both the ledgers will reconcile.
Side chains will create a token but that token will exist only within the Side chains. They will create an artificial token anchored to bitcoin but it will not float in the public market. So, if these proposals like Side chains and Lightning network are actually implemented in next 6 months to a year, I am of the firm belief that Bitcoin might become the next Visa of the Internet. If I talk on this particular topic, I can speak for hundreds of hours.
I personally believe we have actually entered into the third phase of Blockchains. Bitcoin was the first phase of Blockchain Blockchain 1. Ethereum and Dash comprise the second phase of Blockchain Blockchain 2. After that, Platforms like Counterparty, Omnichain started creating more blockchains over their own blockchains, for e. Ether is a blockchain over Omni platform. Most of the current ICOs are blockchain over Ethereum blockchain.
Steem is a blockchain over Bitshares. One wave is followed by second wave and second wave is being followed by the third wave. So in that context, I would say that there are dozens and hundreds of very good projects. If you actually see, the number of project in the last 6 months only, there are at least 50 top quality projects which have been unleashed. So, we would need a very dedicated discussion session for only quality Alternate coins projects. I personally think that we have only seen a couple of black swan events like Bitcoins and Ether, we are yet to see at least a dozen more such top quality events.
Do you see Blockchain becoming a mandatory course in educational curriculum in India? Blockchain will definitely become a compulsory part of our curriculum, particular all technology related courses like BTech, B.
Having said this, the real problem is that India does not have quality faculty. That realization is yet to percolate into the wider academic mass. I hope within next months we will see some good initiative in academic space as far as blockchain curriculum is concerned.
What according to you are the key reasons that there are less people in India interested in cryptocurrency? What should be done to encourage them to invest in cryptocurrency? Indians are by nature late entrants to technology space. Having said this, I would say that in India, there are two kinds of people who are involved in cryptocurrency space. One is a category of over a million people who have invested in Bitcoin, ether or other cryptocurrrency.
There is also a segment of people who are sitting on the periphery, who are simply waiting on the sidelines, that when governments gives complete yes, complete recognition to cryptocurrency they will jump in. If first segment in one million, then the second segment is roughly million. The gap between 1 million and million is the lack of regulatory framework. My point is, that governments can venture into this system but in a manner where some sort of transparency is maintained.
Some exchanges have already started moving in that direction but some couple of more critical steps are yet to be taken and that are missing. For example government can come out one day and say to all exchanges that you are free to run your operations but there should one Indian rate for Bitcoin. In that case, a common man, if he buys bitcoin on a particular day, the rate of Bitcoin on that particular day will be common across India.
It will be important to calculate tax proposals. You can calculate capital gains out of it. These are very small things, but when you actually magnify the impact of these small moves on a big level, you will realize that they actually create a very serious impact. Indians are not, by definition, revolutionist people.
They are very conformist people. So I would say that if Government makes the right move, there will lots and lots of cryptocurrency investors in India.
Do you want to predict the price of Bitcoin in next 5 to 10 years? This guessing game with respect to particular cryptocurrency is something that I would say might be counter-productive. Rather, I would actually, re-phrase this particular question of yours, in a different way. If you ask me, what is the potential size of entire market cap of cryptocurrencies in next 5 years, I can answer that particular question. So I have seen times increase.
If something can rise times in just 6 years, I can see the potential of the same in next 6 years is huge. What I am saying is that the cryptocurrency market cap would rise at least, roughly 50 to times. This is because the range of cryptocurrency that have emerged in the last couple of years, even I could never have imagined such a wide range.
This diversity is so mind boggling that nobody knows which blockchain is a better blockchain, even better that Bitcoin or ether. We see a steep growth of the number of ALT coins in cryptocurrency space? Will investors lose faith in cryptocurrency in the long run? All innovations are always good steps but not all innovations are supposed to succeed finally. Amazon, Facebook, Google are very big projects but they came out of a phase and the phase was called internet dot com bust.
The point is, when something is in a upward momentum, then many people tend to take a jump but all jumps are not lucky jumps. So cryptocurrency are the future but there will be lots of traps in the way, lot of corrections in the way and people will have to work continuously in order to build a serious grammar of investment, ethical behavior and performance statistics.
All these things will have to be managed seriously so that we can build standard templates of what good currency is and what is not a good currency. What are some of the Blockchain start-ups, from India, that you have been associated with? And have you seen a surge in the number of start-ups in the last few years?
No doubt about that! Two years back there were hardly start-ups.