Jimmie Steinbeck, Co-Founder, and CEO of Penning is taking you the readers together with the Pen into the world of Web3, the "buzzword" for blockchain technology which has caused confusion amongst industry newcomers, but we're here to "set the record straight". Web3 is the 3rd revolution in the world of connectivity, but more so it's a game-changer for the world of finance, money, and democracy. So without further ado, have a good read.

The early crypto pioneers wanted to democratize money. Finance 2.0, if you will. But now, the believers in blockchains have their eyes on a bigger prize: They want to decentralize everything. Web 3.0. Facebook without the propaganda. Twitter without the terms of service. Reddit without censorship. Online identity without the hacks. Internet browsing without tracking software. Websites without advertising.

We pay with either attention or privacy. So we either have advertising thrown at us, our attention monetized, or we pay with micro violations of our privacy. And that is why the internet today is the ultimate surveillance economy. One privacy tool is the Brave browser. It doesn't store data and pays users and content publishers in their Basic Attention Tokens. 

- “The Basic Attention Token (BAT) is a blockchain-based system for tracking media consumers' time and attention on websites using the Brave web browser. Built on Ethereum, its goal is to efficiently distribute advertising money between advertisers, publishers, and readers of online marketing content and ads.”

What most people in the crypto space are probably most excited about is the notion that we can create these kinds of user-owned decentralized networks. You can, for instance, offer file storage in the way that Amazon does, or you could offer search, you know, the way Google does, but do it in a peer-to-peer fashion without this behemoth at the center extracting rents. And do it in a way where all the people that are users of it can benefit.

Blockstack is the next evolution in computing. We've seen three main eras of computing before. We had mainframes which were these large computers that everyone depended on. Then we got desktops where users were in control, and they owned their computers, and their data and information. And then we saw cloud computing where we're dependent on these large companies running services for us. And we're about to embark on this major shift in computing called decentralized computing where users are getting back in control. And they really could someday compete with, if not take down some of the big tech giants, like Facebook and Google and the Amazon that we know. That's a tall, tall order.

It is, it is, but I mean who would've thought at the beginning of the Internet that Wikipedia would beat out Encarta? These Web3 promises sound good, but my professional network is on LinkedIn. My photos are on Instagram. If I deleted my accounts, I'd lose everything! These services aren't just walled gardens, they are digital prisons.

Data is locked up in several companies, and we don't own it. The companies own it, but they use the data to mine it, advertise to us, sell us things, manipulate us, to change our behaviour, and Ocean Protocol is the answer to freeing up the data and giving the power back to individuals. So how do you plan to do that? It's essentially an operating system on top of Ethereum that allows people to share data, storage, algorithms, and computation in a way that preserves privacy.

It's too early to tell whether projects like these can succeed. But I do like the idea of digital property rights. Wouldn't it be nice if companies paid us in cryptocurrency when they use our data? and if we control who has access to it instead of our digital overlords. And then there is the question of our most precious information, our very identity. If you take the history of mankind, a lot of blood has been shed getting to democracy, right?

The idea is that every man has a vote in the world. In the United States alone there are 14,000 different paper forms of birth certificates issued by local authorities. There are mistakes in them and even identity theft starting from birth. All your information is already out there. There are +five hacks a day happening, so how do you prove that you are who you say you are? with your compromised information?

Currently, we are holding our reputation, and our history with different systems and different companies, like Facebook and Twitter. With the blockchain, the core of important information sits on that trusted system which we control and we can take it from wherever we want to go to something else.

Penning down the thoughts” is a series compiled by the CEO and Co-Founder of Penning, Jimmie Hansen Steinbeck. A compilation of his vast experience, knowledge, failures, successes, know-how & ideas. Jimmie has spent the last decade (almost since the birth of bitcoin), working in the crypto, blockchain (also known as Web3) space, as an investor, entrepreneur, and expert advisor to numerous crypto companies.


Penning Down The Thoughts: Web3

The latest, and this week's Penning Down The Thoughts with Penning's Co-founder & CEO, Jimmie Steinbeck taking the Pen Team and our readers further down the "rabbit hole", which time from what changed the world forever; the creating, meaning, and impact of the world wide web, and how it correlates directly with what is recently known as Web3. The latter mentioned will be covered in a future post from the series, but this time, sit back, kick back, or however and where ever you are. Have a good read.

In the early 90s, Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web as a 20-page proposal, and soon, some browsers made it more accessible and user-friendly for the general public. I think that the Internet is going to be one of the major forces in reducing the role of Government. The one thing that's missing, but that will soon be developed, is a reliable e-cash.

Still, few understood the potential of this new tech. From people who thought it would just be the world's greatest library, to some of the early cypherpunks, who are the direct forefathers of crypto, and certainly blockchain-type ideas, who thought much as today, that it would create a kind of a Commons that was outside of the direct control and normal laws of Governments. That's ironic because the US Government funded it in the first place. The spiritual forefathers of crypto who built the early Internet thought it was a new technology for global freedom of expression and a blank canvas upon which they could build their dreams. Boy, that sounds familiar!

And the media? They didn't quite know what to make of this new thing either. But sure enough, they found juicy stories about the dark side of it. Which was the Internet is full of criminals, pedophiles, and pornographers. And it's too dangerous to use your credit card on it. It's full of scams. We're seeing the same story now We envision technology as if it were autonomous as if it were simply outside of human and social experience. But we see our technologies that become shaped by commercial interests, by political and regulatory infrastructure, and by actors who are acting for many reasons, right?

The big telecoms wanted his thoughts on a little idea they were kicking around. They had a meeting where they tried to figure out how they could buy the Internet. If they couldn't kill it, well why not own it? well, why don't you buy the world economy, then you can own everything. Why don't you buy the weather, then you can control that too.

Today, with the World Wide Web, we can stand on giant, digital soapboxes using Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. We can share our ideas, or start a fight, with anyone on the planet. Well, almost anyone. Of 65 countries studied, China has the least free Internet, worse than Iran, Cuba, or Syria. 

A police force of more than two million cybercops and the world's most sophisticated Artificial Intelligence system keep China's web content clean and users in check. So sorry to break it to you, but there's no longer a World Wide Web.

Welcome to the Splinternet. No, it's not just in China. In Russia, Wikipedia is illegal. Facebook is outlawed in Bangladesh. There's no WhatsApp in Dubai. Twitter was banned in Turkey after news about Government corruption spread. And Saudi Arabia shut down the region's largest news services, Al Jazeera and the BBC. Meanwhile, in India, the entire web has been turned off more than 300 times in the past years.

So even though they tried to shut down or bye the internet back in the 90th and we see countries with downtime and restrictions, the internet or the World Wide Web is still here, still live, and the same thing will be told about blockchain and crypto assets in the future to come. 

What the internet is for communication and sharing knowledge, the blockchain and digital assets or money will be for financial freedom and store of value. 

Penning down the thoughts” is a series compiled by the CEO and Co-Founder of Penning, Jimmie Hansen Steinbeck. A compilation of his vast experience, knowledge, failures, successes, know-how & ideas. Jimmie has spent the last decade (almost since the birth of bitcoin), working in the crypto, blockchain (also known as Web3) space, as an investor, entrepreneur, and expert advisor to numerous crypto companies.

Penning Down The Thoughts: The World Wide Web

In this week’s “Penning Down The Thoughts” series, Jimmie is taking the Pen team (and the readers), to the origins of the combustion engine. It sounds a bit dramatic, and you might wonder what the h*** does combustion engine have to do with blockchain technology and crypto? Well keep reading, and you might get enlightened. 

All technologies start as interesting ideas, and some of them begin to develop into innovations. We know that the arc from invention to innovation takes a lot of time, and takes a lot of work. Some of those innovations eventually become commercially viable. A case example is the automobile. In the early days, cars looked like a pretty lousy idea and were poorly executed. Early on, there were electric cars, there were battery-operated cars. The combustion engine was a relative latecomer. It took Henry Ford's mass production to create the standards, of what a car looked like, what parts it needed, and how it operated. That's when complementary assets and infrastructure emerged. So you have paved roads and petrol stations. Then you have secondary things like motels and restaurants, and places to eat while you're on the highway and buy food.

Furthermore, interesting questions like what side of the road should we drive on what will the speed limit be, do we need any safety, or what age can you drive a car. That's all regulation, but they can´t (or won't enter the space) before the playground is built, exactly what we're experiencing with crypto & blockchain space, but back to cars. An entire ecosystem had been built, but it wasn't a smooth transition by any means. The imagery here is there are maybe a couple of hundred, three, or four hundred companies that tried to get into this space. But they're not car companies. They're bicycle manufacturers or steam engine, manufacturers. At some point, in this account, all that period of ferment settles around a dominant design, and then you have what, again, what innovation economists would call a shakeout. They would say you go from 300 or 400 producers, all of them vying to shape this emerging space, this emerging thing called the automobile. You may then drop to 20 or 30 manufacturers. And then you may drop to 5 or 6. It took 50 years for cars to go from curious inventions to finally tuned, mass-market products and 50 years to change the world as we knew it.

But why are we talking about the evolution of the car industry? My point is we all today know cars, we use them every day. Many, especially the male part of our race love to see cars, drive cars and talk about cars. but most of us don’t know how to change a simple light bole in a car or change a battery. It’s not important to know everything about everything if the goal is user-friendly mass adoption. 50 years ago a car wasn’t a simple thing to drive. the same with blockchain and crypto assets.10-12 years ago it was almost impossible to use bitcoin because no one knew about it, and there were no businesses and services around it. today just 12 years later, blockchain, web3, and crypto assets are the most invested tech space in the world, ATH investment year after year, millions already own crypto and tens of thousands of companies are building on the blockchain. DEFI space has a 50 % increase every year, and every day comes new opportunities true new tokens, new services, and new markets. It’s time to take place in the driver’s seat and see where the trip takes us. 
 
And it’s not banks, financial institutions, governments, and Wall Street that are building the new economic ecosystem. It’s the nerds, the gamers. small startups that can see problems that need to be solved. It´s innovations. We need exchanges, swap services, custodians, wallet providers, and S-node hosting platforms, we need bridges between the different blockchains and layers. But we also need government helps to set the right playground and fundamental legal structure to build the next and 4th revolution.

"Penning down the thoughts” is a series compiled by the CEO and Co-Founder of Penning, Jimmie Hansen Steinbeck. A compilation of his vast experience, knowledge, failures, successes, know-how & ideas. Jimmie has spent the last decade (almost since the birth of bitcoin), working in the crypto, blockchain (also known as Web3) space, as an investor, entrepreneur, and expert advisor to numerous crypto companies.

Penning Down The Thoughts: The Combustion Engine

In this week’s “Penning Down The Thoughts” series, Jimmie is taking the Pen team (and the readers), to the story of a young Russian-Canadian programmer and how he created the most disruptive technology and financial innovation in history (apart from the blockchain technology & bitcoin, and internet…and the discovery of fire…and sliced bread of course). The system that changed how companies agree, startups raise funds and reward its users. Have a good read.

Back in 2014 vi saw, a young kid, age 19 with the following: 

Just 19 years old, Vitalik was on a mission to make money programmable. Vitalik is a very very smart guy. The thing about Vitalik is he has been pushed away from Bitcoin because he had gone to Bitcoin Core developers and tried to build Ethereum on top of Bitcoin. And they said nope, not interested. So he built a separate blockchain called Ethereum, with its currency called Ether ( ETH). A comparison might be

Bitcoin is like a spreadsheet, and Ethereum is like a spreadsheet with macros. Using our analogy, Ethereum allows you to store cryptocurrency and computer code in the same secure box. 

I will bet with my dad that bitcoin is going to 50.000$ before my birthday on April 16, 2024. We each put an ether into a box along with a smart contract, a simple program that automatically checks the price of Bitcoin on that future date. If I'm right, the money goes to me and my wallet. If I'm wrong, it's sent to my dad’s wallet.

A smart contract is neither smart nor a contract. It's a mindless program, and once you understand that it is a mindless program, it clarifies a lot of stuff, and the word contract there is in the meaning of finance. Most financial arrangements are pretty simple and clear-cut. A bet with my dad, your home loan, and insurance policy, just two parties and some form of exchange of value based on a set of rules called a contract. The same is true for global financial markets.

Vitalik Buterin funded his project by selling Ether (ETH) for bitcoins 2000 Ether for 1 BTC and used a model that later got the name ICO´s - initial coin offering and used an ERC-20 standard token model. 

IPOs and ICOs sound similar, but they have nothing in common. The only thing similar about them is they both help you raise money. IPOs, you're not able to raise capital through a public offering, until you have a company until you have revenue until you have users, and until you can prove to the public investors that this is a valuable company that's worth investing in, and it's worth buying their stock.

ICOs are pre-products, you can look at it like a sophisticated crowdfunding campaign. You have maybe a couple of people on the team. The whole project is built on "just" a white paper, which is a very illustrative business plan, and backers back based on faith and trust.

And this is the guy who opened the floodgates, Fabian Vogelsteller, father of the ERC-20 Standard enabling you or me or anyone to create an ICO. So on one hand, you have these smart contracts, these little programs that can talk to each other, but on the other hand, you have to define how they talk to each other. And because everybody now agrees to that same standard, smart contracts can interact within the entire Ethereum network and the ERC-20 standard allows the creation of tokens.

Vitalik Buterin said “The goal here is like, ultimately, I'd like to see eight-year-olds building their financial systems. So let's say I'm trying to do an ICO, and I create a smart contract where I create a million coins, and one of the transactions is that if you send me $100, I will send you that many worths of coins."

It was a mad gold rush. People realized wow if I can just pull together a project and a white paper, I can raise money. Some say 3-5 % were scams, I believe that 3-5 % were not scams.

Penning Down The Thoughts: The Ethereum Disruption

In this week’s “Penning Down The Thoughts” series, Jimmie is taking the Pen team (and the readers), through anecdotes of what he e describes as the 3 musketeers. It’s a tale of 3 gentlemen and how they each came up with some of the most significant contributions to the crypto ecosystem. Without further ado, have a good read.

To understand what the three gentlemen are arguing about and why they can come to a united agreement, Sampson works on Bitcoin blockchain and Roger Keith Ver on Bitcoin Cash, and Charlie Lee on Litecoin, Yes I know it starts to get a bit technical. 

One philosophy could be described as Bitcoin as digital gold, and the other philosophy could be described as Bitcoin as digital cash. The other team said you guys have it the wrong way around. First, Bitcoin needs to be usable as a currency, a medium of exchange. Then, maybe, it will become stable and a store of value. The solution is easy, just increase the size of the blocks from one to two, four, or eight megabytes so that more transactions fit into them. This will lower the fees, and people will start using Bitcoin as cash again.

The original title of the Bitcoin white paper is Bitcoin, an electronic peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Satoshi's white paper isn't the Bible. It's not a religion. Stuff changes, we evolve, and we might find out new things. So why this fixation on that white paper was created 12 years ago?

Roger Keith Ver told “There isn't any fixation. It's not the version of Bitcoin that I got involved with, and it's not the version of Bitcoin that I want to support.”

So Roger Keith Ver joined forces with a controversial online gambling billionaire, Bitmain, a Chinese crypto mining company. They forced a software fork, which is a split into two separate blockchains, every holder of Bitcoin now also owned the same amount of Bitcoin Cash. 

Every revolution is followed by a counter-revolution, which is usually a purge of the original revolutionaries. People are very passionate about Bitcoin. And that's why they show a lot of emotion. When you're part of a tribe, you get very religious about your tribe, making the other tribe almost your enemy. It's tough to debate Roger because a lot of what he's saying is just his opinions and his emotions. You cannot debate someone's emotions.

Now the industry has grown so much that they are competing parties, propaganda machines, and conspiracy theories. Looks a lot like politics. The biggest fight within the Bitcoin ecosystem is far from over, who has the right to the name Bitcoin?

So who won Bitcoin's first war? Well, both parties got their way. After the split, the market valued Bitcoins much higher. And Bitcoin Cash (BCH) transaction fees were much lower. The benefit of the scaling debate or civil war was

Bitcoin was battle-tested, like many companies and many powerful people tried very hard to try to change Bitcoin, and they failed. This thing that Satoshi Nakamoto launched is much more resilient than anyone even hoped.

I know, I know, you want to find out what any of this has to do with this new Web3, a revolutionary internet. We'll get there, I promise, but first, we need to go from Bitcoins’ original blockchain to hundreds of blockchains. 

Back in 2011, when Charlie Lee was a Google engineer, he wanted a faster and lighter version of Satoshi's cryptocurrency and was one of the first to experiment with open-source software. The actual coding in terms of the code differences became Bitcoin and Litecoin was pretty trivial.

Litecoin was positioned as silver to Bitcoin's gold. And its network value grew to billions of dollars. Some critics say: Well, he sold at the highest point, and he kind of hurt the community. 
Charlie Lee said “When I sold, no one knew it was at the highest point. I didn't know it was gonna be the highest point, everyone thought it was gonna keep going up. In hindsight, it was good timing, to sell it at that high. But I'm still focused full-time on Litecoin adoption, and working on Litecoin, and Litecoin development. So it's not like I sold it and just quit.”

Litecoin was one of the first alternative cryptocurrencies or altcoins. Some of the early adopters, like Charlie, made fortunes, and soon, there were hundreds of coins made by cryptographers, copycats, and con men. There's a coin for bloggers, a currency for online gamers, one with anonymity, and even one for banks. But can this invention unleash something even more powerful than digital currencies?

“Penning down the thoughts” is a series compiled by the CEO and Co-Founder of Penning, Jimmie Hansen Steinbeck. A compilation of his vast experience, knowledge, failures, successes, know-how & ideas. Jimmie has spent the last decade (almost since the birth of bitcoin), working in the crypto, blockchain (also known as Web3) space, as an investor, entrepreneur, and expert advisor to numerous crypto companies.

Penning Down The Thoughts: The 3 Musketeers - SV, Cash & Lite

In this week’s “Penning Down The Thoughts” series, Jimmie is taking the Pen team (and the readers), through what bitcoin is and why it came to the world, and how the established society and system reacted towards it. Also, the readers will get a glimpse of where it's headed, and whether will it keep going over "the heads" of the masses, or will they join? That and much more, in this week's "Penning Down The Thoughts" series.

Let's go back to where Bitcoins are stored, which is in transparent digital deposit boxes, protected by strong cryptography. They can never be copied or left in the vault because any transaction of any Bitcoin, down to a 100 millionth fraction (called 1 satoshi) is recorded in the blockchain for eternity.

This synchronized global ledger is shared among thousands of computers worldwide. That's why it can't be compromised or altered. We can make an infinite number of perfect digital copies of a movie, a song, or any file, but for the first time in history, this distributed record-keeping allows us to have a truly unique and fungible and non-fungible digital object that is also scarce, just like NFT, which I will get back to later. 

If you could count all of these virtual coins and assets, you'd find about 18 million of them (Bitcoins) today. The mining reward is the only way new coins are created. In the first years of Bitcoin, miners competed for 50 Bitcoins every 10 minutes. Then their reward for processing transactions dropped to 25 Bitcoins, then 12.5, and then half, again and again, every four years or 250.000 blocks give or take. It's good old-fashioned supply and demand. If investors or users of Bitcoin create a higher demand than this decreasing supply, the price will go up. When the cap of 21 million is reached, the protocol stops the network from creating anymore. It's the opposite of our traditional fiat money supply, which keeps growing and growing, and an unlimited amount of dollars versus a very limited supply of Bitcoins, you do the math! 

If you use euros or dollars, you might not care about a little inflation per year. But if your currency isn't stable, you might be a trillionaire on paper, but "dead" broke in reality. 

One of the thousands of stories goes “I grow up in Patagonia in the southern part of Argentina. My parents are sheep ranchers there, and I remember growing up in my childhood, I saw my parents lose everything three times, first because of a huge devaluation, then because of hyperinflation, and the last time because the Government confiscated all our bank deposits. I think that today, there are billions of people, at least four billion people who would be a lot better off by having access to a form of money that is non-political and more democratic.”

We think of finance. We think of banking. We think of money. In terms of the experience and perspective of Western European or developed nation person, that is just 1,5 billion people who have a very privileged financial life. What about the other six billion? About 2 billion don´t have access to banking, just because they don’t have an ID.

Every free single country has essentially a legal status for cryptocurrencies that is very open and permissive. And every single country that is unfree has restrictive or banned cryptocurrency status.

The very first open crypto-war is playing out in Venezuela where the local currency loses value every hour due to hyperinflation. A lot of people in Venezuela are trying to mine cryptocurrencies. And the government views this as a threat obviously because they're trying to keep the Bolivar propped up. The government provided electricity to a lot of people, and if they perceive that your electricity usage has gone up, they will come and check if you have mining equipment in your house, and they will confiscate it if they find it.

So the title is "Jamie Dimon, from Laura Shin."Here's why you're wrong about Bitcoin".

“Dimon runs JP Morgan Chase, one of the largest banks in the world that moves $6 trillion every single day. Oh, you said of Bitcoin eventually, it will be closed. And then I said to anyone who knows anything about the technology, this is an incredibly absurd statement. I even said it was a little bit hilarious because I find it kind of funny the idea that you thought you could close Bitcoin. But you'd have to shut down the Internet, which also doesn't make sense. I could understand if you wanted Bitcoin shut down, or hoped it was a fraud. I mean if I were you, and if I understood the disruption that crypto assets could bring to financial services, I'd be very scared. And I think whatever Jamie Dimon says or thinks about Bitcoin is as relevant as whatever the Postmaster General thought or said about email: Who cares? 
- Sincerely, Laura Shin.”

But some politicians still think they can stop open-source software.  

The government doesn´t believe in fundamental freedoms and Human Rights because if they don't trust their citizens to have control over their own money, that says a lot about the government and says very little about cryptocurrency. The reason why some Governments and most banks are threatened by this technology is simple, your private key and your wallet can replace your bank account. The network is run by software and its currency is made and maintained by computing power and electricity. It can't be manipulated by central bankers, Wall Street lobbyists, or politicians. But with new freedom comes new responsibility. The simple rule is if you control the keys, it's your Bitcoin. If you don't control the keys, it's not your Bitcoin. Your keys, your Bitcoin. Not your keys, not your Bitcoin.

If you lose your key, you will never be able to access your coins again. And if someone hacks your computer or phone where you store those passwords, your coins will be stolen in a second. And that´s another big task to work on. I don´t believe we will get mass adoption if every single individual on the planet has to be their bank and cyber security expert. Or have to make choices about what crypto assets they are going with. Companies like our partner, ARYZE are building solutions with stablecoins or digital money one-to-one as we know our fiat currencies today. Our own company Penning is building an investment infrastructure so that our clients easily and securely can invest in DeFi without having years of experience. All these services and solutions developed in thousands of companies around the world need a simple and friendly regulatory ground to build on. Hence, we have the necessary security for KYC, AML, etc, but still can’t ´make services that are fit for the average joe to use.

If you don't think Bitcoin is already changing the world's concept of money, you haven't been paying attention. Mervyn used to be a senior executive at Deutsche Bank, his colleagues once said Bitcoin was for lawbreakers and troublemakers. He now runs a $100 million crypto fund out of Malta. Their research shows that the crypto markets are gonna probably be worth about $8.7 trillion in 2027.

Most financial analysts say you better stick to your shares, bonds, and dollars. Bitcoin is dangerous nonsense, far too risky as an investment. To others, Bitcoin is an escape hack that will take them away from risk, insurance against financial doomsday, a way out of the debt crisis, negative interest rates, trade wars, and economic downturn. They say it's an anti-fragile asset uncorrelated to financial markets. So who's right here?

Well, every time I turn on the television, it gets even more confusing. Bitcoin is worth about a bit under $361 billion today, all the gold in the world is worth eight trillion, and it could become the next gold. 

Warren Buffett is currently the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. He is one of the most successful investors in the world with a net worth of over $97 billion as of September 2022, making him the world's seventh-wealthiest person, he said.

 “..in terms of cryptocurrencies, generally, I can say almost with certainty that they will come to a bad ending. But if Bitcoin is out there, and gold is out there, it can be a participant in bringing down the dollar. I say it's the mother of all bubbles, and it's also the biggest bubble in human history..."

I would say the biggest financial mistake you can make right now is to own an amount of Bitcoin that you cannot afford to lose because it's super risky and you may lose it.

The second biggest financial mistake you can make is not owning any.

As long as Bitcoin keeps doing sudden increases in prices, that's gonna stop retail use in its tracks. With Bitcoin, you can send $1 or $1 million worth of value anywhere in the world.

Cheap, easy, fast, global, unstoppable, that was the deal, and back in 2009-2015, this was possible. Every block contains about one megabyte of data, much smaller than a photo you post on Instagram, which means only a limited number of transactions can fit into each block. If you want your payment to jump the line, you can choose to pay a premium fee or sit and wait. At one point, the blocks became so full that the transaction time went to several hundred hours, instead of the normal 10 minutes. And it was more expensive than international wire services. It got so bad that a Bitcoin conference wouldn't take payment in Bitcoins! 

I don’t know, but Roger Keith Ver has an idea about why. 

“That's a direct intentional result of Bitcoin Core's policies of intentionally making it slow, expensive and unreliable. And Roger Keith Ver blames Adam Back as a British cryptographer and cypherpunk. He is the CEO of Blockstream for Bitcoin not becoming a mainstream global currency. There is no shortage of conspiracy theories. Blockstream was founded in 2014. The original co-founders are a lot of core developers. Those are the software coders who continue building Bitcoin after Satoshi vanished. Roger Keith Ver thinks those guys sabotaged the scaling of the network so Blockstream could promote its software solutions. 

Sampson from Blockstream said “the blockchain is already 200 Gigabytes large and growing, every transaction made has to go out to the whole network, and every block that contains that transaction that is mined has also to go out to the whole network. And it has to be stored for eternity.

The argument, more independent miners will continue running Bitcoin and ensure decentralization if the blockchain is kept small. In his view, this decentralization is what makes Bitcoin valuable, a store of value!”

Penning Down The Thoughts: Bitcoin, The Meaning & Mission

In this week’s “Penning Down The Thoughts” series, Jimmie is taking the Pen team (and the readers), through anecdotes of how the blockchain, cryptocurrencies specifically bitcoin has opened a new world for the masses of the global population. A group of people who didn’t have access or escape for that matter before the emergence of the blockchain. Read on and understand what it all means. 

Financial freedom for everyone is just around the corner. The world's most populous network is adopting Bitcoin, which is the Internet. The world's largest economy is adopting Bitcoin, the internet. The world's biggest communication network is adopting Bitcoin, again the Internet. We have transcended borders.

Awarded-winning journalist Laura Shin told once a story about women bloggers in Afghanistan being paid in Bitcoin. One of the women had an abusive husband and saved up her Bitcoins and eventually was able to divorce him because she was able to control her money when she earned the Bitcoins.

In the early stages of the Internet, we were told that it was only for criminals, pedophiles, and scammers, but it turned out years later to be a lot more. Because of the Internet, third countries can connect and get information from around the world and by that get the opportunity to build businesses and a better life for themselves. The new generation is living on the internet, and blockchain and Web3 will push this trend even faster. 

In the early stages of bitcoin and blockchain, there was an anarchist movement that drove the use, and we saw some shady business going on. It was either drugs, pornography, arms sales, or money laundering. The Silk Road was a black market, on the dark web where the buyers and sellers used Bitcoins to fly under the radar of the authorities. It had one million users until the FBI showed up and shut it down. They caught the guy running it and confiscated the coins held in escrow by snatching his computer. And then they locked him away for life. case closed. Crimes and shady business will always de where there is money. But blockchain technology shoves that it’s a lot harder to hide and get away with criminal activities because of the protocols and the transparency of the ledgers and all the transactions. Today Chainalysis is an American blockchain analysis firm headquartered in New York City. The company was co-founded by Michael Gronager and Jonathan Levin in 2014. It sells software that aids its customers in blockchain analysis and has sent out its annual report showing that today criminal activities on the blockchain are less than 1 % of all transactions showing that all the innovative and legal regulations that have been built and brawled into the crypto ecosystem are working and making it a sustainable system for the word to use in the future. 

No doubt crypto-assets and cryptocurrencies can be a tool for criminal activity. But so are dollar bills or the banking system. And let's not forget the blockchain is a public ledger. It's useful for uncovering crimes. A former federal prosecutor named Kathryn Haun was the one who discovered that there were a couple of federal agents that were pilfering the Bitcoins that the Government had obtained from the Silk Road case for their gain.

And what was interesting was she got a tip that there might be one agent that was doing this. But from looking at the movements on the blockchain itself, she realized that there were two people. The prosecutor could see those Bitcoins being moved. And when the dirty cops tried to sell them for dollars, they got busted.

About 2 billion don´t have access to banking, just because they don’t have an ID, whit this new technology, the only thing they need is a smartphone and they have access to banking. blockchain (DeFi) banking. 

But if Bitcoin is this uncontrollable, non-censorable technology. Can the blockchain also enable global free speech?

In some places, it already does. One Chinese student tried to report a sexual assault and was silenced by her college. But she knew that she could attach a message to the metadata of an Ethereum transaction. So she spent 15 cents and now her letter outlining her story and the threats she received is on the public Ethereum blockchain where it will remain unchangeable forever.

We also see blockchain and crypto assets being used to donate and send money to countries that are under restriction, or in any way cut off from the traditional banking and financial network because of war, sanctions, dictatorship etc. 

NGOs around the world spend millions on just handling and sending money to different projects in the world. There are definitely opportunities in blockchain technology to optimize this process and get more value for the donations they get.

Wikipedia also got donations and payments in bitcoin years ago, to obtain operation under the whistleblower case. Another thing you can use text data in your transaction is to document that you are the true owner of the wallet and the assets held in it. Something many still are waiting for Craig Wright to do and prof he is Satoshi Nakamoto. I will get back to Craig Wright, he is dividing the space.

Penning Down The Thoughts: Financial Freedom & Free Speech for All

In this week’s “Penning Down The Thoughts” series, Jimmie is taking the Pen team (and the readers), through a series of actual use cases, ending with a full list of blockchain and ledger use cases. Blockchain technology has since its inception post 08’ financial meltdown, been questioned for its actual value in the “real world”, and we’re here to put those concerns to rest. Here’s a walk through of how big corporations are applying the technology to their infrastructure and how it might change the way we do business in the future. So, without further ado, have a good read.

Do we need more than one blockchain? Is Bitcoin or Ethereum, not enough? If just one blockchain and it's going to fit everything, it's almost like disregarding the nature of evolution. Meanwhile, big corporations have been studying cryptocurrency. And they think that Bitcoin's underlying database is where the magic is. The motto in the boardrooms is Blockchain YES, Bitcoin NO!

BMW is looking at using the blockchain for its future fleet of electric cars to interact with public transport. Lufthansa wants to see if the blockchain can better track parts and maintenance. And Deutsche Telekom is using smart contracts to negotiate tariffs for roaming costs with other telecoms. if we can store trade certificates and shipping documents on the blockchain, you can check to see where that organic fruit came from, who grew them, who packed them, and who shipped them.

Besides, the Internet of things needs a ledger of all those things.

Well, that's the idea behind private centralized blockchains, maintained and controlled by corporations. A famous example is the Walmart supply chain trial, in which they're working with IBM. That's completely centralized. They use a blockchain-derived product called Hyperledger, but all the nodes reside on the IBM cloud, and they're all administered by Walmart, and the supplier is used because Walmart told them to. It's a centralized database system! But they marketed it as Blockchain.

So that means they wouldn't have got a New York Times headline if they just said database. Blockchain is becoming a BUZZ word, and most don't know how or how they are going to use it in their operation. I believe that from now on and 5-10 years into the future, we will see a big increase in the use of blockchain and metaverse in companies around the world. My guesstimate is, 90 % of the AAA brands are using it in some way in their daily business. 

You might wonder what's the point of a blockchain if it's controlled by a company.

Well, I compare it to the open Internet versus company-owned Intranets. They both exist.

Meanwhile, Facebook announced a cryptocurrency for their two billion users. Such a system might be more efficient than a public blockchain, but there's a downside. Some Governments banned it within weeks. Right now, the ways, pieces of paper, that are being shifted around, that doesn't make any sense. That infrastructure needs to be replaced. 

Why occupy Wall Street when we can build a new one on the blockchain instead? In the future decentralized finance, stock certificates, corporate bonds, insurance policies, property debts, and mortgages, can all be turned into crypto tokens and made tradable 24/7.

I think some examples of this that we're seeing now are MakerDao, Binance which has Binance Coin, that's a much bigger opportunity because it represents something new.

Why do I need a blockchain for this? Can't I invest in a solar farm without this new fancy tech? The blockchain acts as a kind of asset register and income register, and in tokenizing the asset, it becomes tradable on an exchange. You might own two or three solar panels of a thousand, you know, in a solar farm, and you would receive the income associated with that amount of ownership.” 

Earlier this year I gathered and made a list with more than 250 different solutions, for 39 different industries to use blockchain in their businesses. Here are a few examples, and by using the link you can see the entire list. 
 
1. Cryptocurrencies 2. Supply chain management 3. Identity verification 4. Voting systems 5. Real estate 6. Health care 7. Education 8. Food safety 9. Carbon credits 10. Music Industry 11. Art 12. Science 13. Social media 14. Ride-sharing 15. Energy 16. Charity / Non-profits 17. Insurance 18. Government 19. Online advertising 20. Retail 21. Manufacturing 22. Shipping 23. Travel 24. Rentals 25. Personal Finance 26. Online marketplaces 27. Public transportation 28. Cloud storage 29. Cybersecurity 30. Legal 31. HR 32. Telecommunication 33. Energy trading 34. Online gaming 35. Lotto, Poker Slots games 36. Crowdfunding 37. Intellectual property 38. Data management 39. Taxes.

Click here for the FULL LIST of detailed solutions and then we'll "talk" again next week.

“Penning for the thoughts” is a series compiled by the CEO and Co-Founder of Penning, Jimmie Hansen Steinbeck. A compilation of his vast experience, knowledge, failures, successes, know-how & ideas. Jimmie has spent the last decade (almost since the birth of bitcoin), working in the crypto, blockchain (also known as Web3) space, as an investor, entrepreneur, and expert advisor to numerous crypto companies.

Penning Down The Thoughts: More Than Payments & Moving Assets

Stake in the world of Crypto is not something you eat, while a nice steak in itself is rewarding (for some), a stake in the "cryptic sense" is the reward for...well Jimmie Steinbeck, will explain that further down in this week's "Penning Down The Thoughts" drop, where he will take you through the journey what staking and maternodes are, how it began and what it means for the future of finance. Keep reading, get informed, be intrigued and without further ado, enjoy your read.

After working with POW mining, Bitcoin, Ether, and other smaller coins, which we mined with GPU or ASIC chip miners, years later, I believe it was at the end of 2015 I got interested in new more energy and hardware-inexpensive protocols in the validation process of blocks on different blockchains. 

POS, Proof of Stake, means no use of heavy hardware and energy-swallowing GPU or ASIC chip mining equipment. All you needed was cloud-based server hosting, coins, tokens, and of course, the knowledge to set up masternodes and staking pools. I was still not the most technical guy in the space, but I managed to set up my first nodes in the Dash protocol. 1000 dash coins to start with. That was the easy part, buy with bitcoin on an exchange like Kraken or Bitstamp, which at that point and still today are one of the biggest and most respected exchanges in the world. 

Through Bitcoin Talk Denmark Scandinavian most active and best blockchain and crypto assets community on Facebook I started with Jack, the CEO of ARYZE back in 2013, and we made some tests with the community to see if there was a space and market for masternode hosting pool service. And the answers were yes indeed. 

I contacted Morten Rongaard an old friend and today CEO of Reality+ a Web3 and metaverse specialist based in London but with deep roots in Denmark and asked him to help me build a platform, and he was in. Casper Spur a community member who has a background in computational mechanics and security and protocol supporter and more than 15 years of experience in the IT industry was the next person I contacted In late 2016/2017 this journey led to starting Stakem, an online cloud-based masternode hosting rewards pool platform. 

It exploded, in the first month after announcing this new service where you could earn a lot of money in a short time. The interest we got was crazy. +1000 users in the first month and + 2000 nodes running with 15-20 blockchain protocols. we had days where we earned +3 BTC in various tokens and coins for our users, and we got 5-15 % of the income generated to handle the hosting, payouts, and setting up of the nodes. 

This year we learned everything there was to know in this space. We built programs and codes to handle the automated setup of nodes on servers, generated a mass payment process, and started to build Stakem 2.0 a 100 % fully automated staking and masternode pool platform, the world jet to have seen. 

But at the end of 2017, the first really bad crypto winter started out of the blue after ATH was all over the market. About 90 % of the pools and nodes we ran lost up to 100 % of the value. There were new small projects, not like Ethereum that recently changed to POS protocol. Some projects and teams just ran and left us, our users, and others in the communities sitting back with worthless coins and tokens. We went from a successful and fast-growing platform with thousands of users and +5000 running nodes to almost 0 income and a lot of expenses on servicer hosting etc in less than weeks. 

A lot of users including me and others from the team, lost a lot of money that day and the coming month. Personally, the team, Stakem +50 Bitcoins worth of different tokens, and the users all were invested in the same nodes even when we tried to sell as much as we could, the market was not there anymore, and exchanges were delisting tokens so we couldn’t convert into bitcoin or Ether anywhere. Coins and tokens that had lost 50-90 % but still were traded on exchanges and still had community and teams working, we did run all the nodes for more than a year after this event, paying all the running costs from our pocket, just in hope that the market changed and our user got the chance to recover some or all of there loses. 

This never happens. A good example “DASH node” price in 2017 1,7 million$ price today 4,800$. The market wasn’t ready for this business. Later we bought SNODE, which was our biggest competitor in the market I believe after Ether merged to POS protocol and we saw bigger chains feeling the time is ready again to look into a service like Stakem and SNODE. 

This time it will be an investment product for institutional investors and infrastructure for blockchains like Concordium, Etherium, Polkadot, Polygon etc. they all need PoS and nodes to validate the traffic on their network. This will be a part of the solutions Penning will provide in the future. 

Every company I have been involved in or started the past 12 years has lead to starting Penning. In 2020 together with Claus from DigiShares, we made the first drawings and since then, the team has grown to 12 team members, we made a lot of changes on the way and I’m thrilled to see what it will evolve into over the coming years.

Proof of stake (PoS) is a type of consensus algorithm used by some blockchain networks to achieve distributed consensus. In a proof of stake system, the creator of a new block is chosen in a deterministic way, depending on their stake (how many coins they hold) in the network.

In contrast to proof of work (PoW) consensus, which relies on miners solving cryptographic puzzles to validate transactions and create new blocks, proof of stake systems does not require computational power to validate transactions and create new blocks. Instead, the creator of a new block (called a "validator") is chosen based on the amount of cryptocurrency they have staked, or "locked up," as a commitment to the network. Validators are then responsible for validating transactions and creating new blocks and are rewarded for their work with a share of the transaction fees and/or new coins that are created as part of the block reward.

Proof-of-stake systems are designed to be more energy efficient than proof-of-work systems, as they do not require miners to perform computationally intensive tasks to validate transactions and create new blocks. They also tend to be more decentralized, as the probability of being chosen as a validator is proportional to the amount of stake held, rather than the computational power of the miner.

A masternode is a full node, or computer wallet, that holds a full copy of the blockchain and participates in the consensus process of a cryptocurrency network. Masternodes often perform specific functions or provide additional services beyond those of a regular full node, such as enabling instant transactions, private transactions, and voting on governance issues.

To operate a masternode, a user must typically hold a minimum amount of the cryptocurrency and meet certain technical requirements, such as having a dedicated IP address and meeting minimum hardware specifications. Masternodes are often rewarded for their contributions to the network with a portion of the block reward, in addition to any transaction fees they may earn.

Masternodes can be used in various types of blockchain networks, including those that use proof of work (PoW) and proof of stake (PoS) consensus mechanisms. They are often used to provide additional network services, such as enabling instant transactions or providing privacy features and can also play a role in governance by allowing masternode operators to vote on proposals or changes to the network.

Stakem & Masternodes

The blockchain technology did for the world of finance what the internet did to access to information. The blockchain changed every aspect of finance, investing, and payments. The core soul of blockchain technology is to eliminate intermediaries, and for the world of payments, the blockchain has reduced long settlement timeframes, centralized cost structure, and increasingly bettering the speed of payments and 1:1 financial transactions. Here’s the first drop of the year from the series “Penning down the thoughts” by Penning’s co-founder and CEO, Jimmie Steinbeck. Have a good read.

CREDIT CARDS, APPLE PAY VS BLOCKCHAIN-BASED PAYMENT SOLUTIONS

In 2014-18 a new race started in the crypto tech space, crypto assets-backed debit cards. A solution that allowed users to get a payment card that was connected to our crypto wallets. The need for spending your crypto in everyday payments is huge and a lot of ICOs were founded on that idea. Crypto.com started as a debit card solution with a native token solution. There was a handful of very successful ICOs but they all ended up doing nothing of the stuff they told in their white paper. https://www.getstack.ca was one that still is in operation, but their STK token is nowhere to use in their system. they raised $17 million on STK token sales. Today these tokens are worth zero, and every single exchange or wallet provider has their own solution today. 

Credit cards are old technology, and pretty complex, your payment details are shared with many middlemen. Each of these parties is also taking a cut of the action, which is built into the price of nearly everything you buy. Credit cards handle almost $20 trillion of transactions per year.

A credit card is a financial product that allows the cardholder to borrow money from the issuer to make purchases or withdraw cash. Credit cards are issued by banks or other financial institutions and can be used to pay for goods and services at merchants that accept them. The cardholder is required to pay back the borrowed money, plus interest, at a later date. 

Credit cards work by allowing the cardholder to borrow money from the issuer up to a certain credit limit. The cardholder can then make purchases or withdraw cash using the credit card, and the issuer pays the merchant or cash provider on the cardholder's behalf. The cardholder is then required to pay back the borrowed money, plus any applicable interest, at a later date.

Credit cards typically have a variety of features and benefits, such as rewards programs that offer points, miles, or cash back for purchases made with the card. They may also offer additional perks such as extended warranties, purchase protection, or travel insurance. Credit cards can be a convenient and secure way to make purchases and access cash, but they can also be a source of debt if not used responsibly. It is important for cardholders to understand the terms and conditions of their credit card, including the interest rate, fees, and repayment terms, to ensure that they are using the card in a financially responsible way.

If you purchase something internationally, double the number of middlemen and triple the fees and why is that? It’s just for updating numbers in digital ledgers. After all, it's just moving data. We can send a picture or video to anyone on the planet almost instantly, for free. We live in the age of the Internet sharing data today shut be zero to none in cost, but the banks won't send the data after 5:00 p.m., or on a weekend? That doesn't make any sense.  
 
The big issue about credit cards today is that we use them online and they actually are not designed for being used for that. That’s also the reason that companies like VISA and Mastercard spend billions of dollars every year on internet fraud and protection.

There are a few reasons why credit cards may not be the best choice for making purchases or payments online.

Security concerns: Credit card information can be vulnerable to fraud or identity theft when it is transmitted online. While credit card companies generally offer protection against unauthorized charges, there is still a risk of a financial loss if the card information is compromised.

High-interest rates: Credit cards often have higher interest rates than other types of loans or financing options. This can make it more expensive to use a credit card to make purchases online, especially if the cardholder carries a balance from month to month.

Hidden fees: Credit cards may have hidden fees, such as annual fees or foreign transaction fees, that can add to the overall cost of using the card. These fees may not be apparent at the time of purchase but can significantly increase the overall cost of the transaction.

Limited protections: Credit cards may not offer the same level of protection as other payment methods, such as debit cards or payment services like PayPal, for online purchases. For example, a credit card may not offer the same level of fraud protection or the ability to dispute a charge with the merchant.

Overall, while credit cards can be a convenient and secure way to make purchases and payments online, it is important to be aware of the potential risks and costs associated with using them.


That’s why we need an international payment system and digital cash that prevents users against it. A solution that transcended borders between countries and jurisdictions. Digital cash we can send to each other without needing a traditional bank connection. By the way + 2 billion people in the world do not have access to banking because they don’t fit the boxes today to get a bank account around the world.
 
But can we not just use the international banking network they have been building for years? yes, we can, but it will not make it easier, cheaper and more secure than if we built it on a decentralised and open blockchain. The Key is the development and making things better for everyone.
 
In the United States and other places in the world, the corporate intermediaries providing today's critical but privately-owned infrastructure are becoming fewer larger and more powerful and their failures are increasing increasingly grave. The Equifax, an American credit bureau data breach occurred between May and July 2017, private records of 147.9 million Americans along with 15.2 million British citizens and about 19,000 Canadian citizens were compromised and their social security numbers were exposed to hackers. The swift network has relayed hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent transactions because of hacked member banks in Bangladesh Vietnam Ecuador and Russia. The FBI suspects now that the largest of these hacks was perpetrated by North Korean corrupt low-level employees at an Indian bank Punjab national was able to fraudulently certify swift messages stealing 1.8 billion dollars it's the largest electronic bank robbery in history. 

In October 2016 an estimated 1.2 million internet-connected devices were hacked and turned into a botnet that for several hours made prominent websites unavailable across Europe and North America including CNN, Fox News, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. 

Increasingly physical machines are being connected to the internet to augment their capabilities they're wired through servers that are owned and maintained by private and trusted intermediaries the so-called internet of things pacemakers from st Jude’s hospital have been hacked. Baby monitors from Trendnet have been hacked. Jeeps from jeep have been hacked to the point where they can be remotely commanded and driven off the road. 

Now those vulnerabilities are inescapable in systems that have single points of failure it doesn't matter if the point of failure is a corporation or if it's a government there shouldn't be a single point of failure similar choke points existed before the internet if you wanted to deliver a message you'd have to go through one of three television broadcasters or a handful of newspapers private corporations are essential but no critical infrastructure should rely on one or two the internet removed single points of failure in communications infrastructure and ushered in a wave of competition among new media corporations building on top of its public rails blockchains can similarly disintermediate critical payments and IoT infrastructure the technology is not yet ready to answer all of those questions today but it is our best hope and as with the internet in the 1990s we need a light touch pro-innovation policy to ensure that these innovations flourish. Digital money is made for a digital world economy and must run on a digital open ledger.

Penning Down The Thoughts: The Disruption of Payments

Amidst the FTX scandal, Penning’s co-founder and CEO Jimmie Steinbeck is out with another drop with the Pen Team about the (then) largest exchanges and the scandal they themselves created. Experiencing scamming companies in both TradFi and DeFi is nothing new, but hopefully, after the recent fall of FTX, the community will stop allowing history to repeat itself.

Mt. Gox was a Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange that operated between 2010 and 2014. It was responsible for more than 80% of Bitcoin transactions at its peak. Although it is most commonly known as Mt. Gox, the exchange is sometimes referred to as Mt. Gox or Mt Gox.  Jed McCaleb created the website that became the Mt. Gox exchange. 
It was initially a way for enthusiasts of the card game "Magic: The Gathering" to trade cards online. The name Mt. Gox was created as an acronym for "Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange." 
 
The site was transferred to Mark Karpeles in 2011 in exchange for six months’ worth of revenue. Karpeles became the largest shareholder and CEO.
 
Mt. Gox was considered the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange at its peak. It handled 70% to 80% of the trading volume. Handling so many transactions gave Mt. Gox an outsized role in determining Bitcoin's market activity. For example, in 2013 it suspended trading for several days to cool down the market.
 
In 2014, Mt. Gox was “hacked” and hundreds of thousands of Bitcoins were stolen. The company filed for bankruptcy shortly thereafter. In late 2021, creditors and the Tokyo District Court reached an agreement on the Mt. Gox rehabilitation plan, closing a seven and half years of a legal battle. We were many that lost a large amount in this bankruptcy. it was still the early days and we had much to learn about cyber security. That day in 2014 my exchange wallet got 400 bitcoin liter and I never saw them again.

At the same time another exchange in the US, TradeHill Exchange, also called TradeHill, was a Bitcoin exchange launched in June 2011 by Jered Kenna, an early Bitcoin enthusiast. It was among the first Bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchanges. Unfortunately, TradeHill essentially ran out of funding after dealing with lawsuits and regulatory issues. They lost their bank partner shortly after expanding and had just moved into bigger offices. At that time, regulation was a lot harder than today. there was no help to get and no regulations or standards to lean up to. Everything had to be done in the making. I myself tried it in Denmark in 2011 and had to stop shortly after. 
Later in 2013, Trade Hill reopened after launching a new service called Prime. Prime was a business-to-business digital exchange intended to facilitate the exchange of digital currencies between businesses and large investors.

Unfortunately, the day TradeHill re-launched, the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network released its new regulation on virtual currencies, which confirmed that anyone selling units of a decentralized virtual currency to another person for real currency or its equivalent is categorized as a money transmitter. TradeHill Shut Down in August 2013. 

Shortly after we saw 2 new exchanges starting their business, Kraken, and BitStamp, both are today some of the biggest and most respected exchanges among B2B and are also some Penning is using to handle trades for our clients. Penning is on the path of setting a new standard for crypto companies, believing that full transparency is not enough, but being fully compliant is equally important without having to compromise with the principles of DeFi. Setting new standards should not be based on the shoulders of spectacular failures but rather on doing things how they were supposed to from the very get-go. Greed has served no one, but one's own ego, and whether you're on top of a Mountain or in jail, you are all alone. 

Penning Down The Thoughts: Mt. Gox & TradeHill

Another drop from co-founder and CEO, Jimmie Steinbeck, “walking” with The Pen Team and explaining the whole shenanigan about bitcoin mining. During the Gold rush in the mid-1800s, mining became a method for the rapid influx of fortune seekers. Today the term mining is synonymous with the process of solving complex mathematical challenges on the bitcoin blockchain. Here’s a read on what mining is, means, and how it all began right here in Penning’s “hometown”.

Before we begin, maybe it’s a good idea to explain what mining is. Bitcoin is in many ways considered gold, and back in the “gold old days”, people would literally dig for gold, more commonly known as mining gold. Today a Gold mining business is run by big to medium corporations, through explorative projects in areas where they project Gold to exist. Now back to Bitcoin mining, as explained in the previous post of this series, bitcoin exists on blockchain technology which is a complicated mathematical process. In order for any transaction to be conducted a series of equations occur to make the transaction as unique as possible, which is why the keys and IDs for wallets are so cryptic and complex to look at. So, Bitcoin mining is the process of creating new bitcoins by solving extremely complicated math problems to verify transactions in the currency. When a bitcoin is successfully mined, the miner receives a predetermined amount of bitcoin. For each transaction, a new block to the bitcoin blockchain is added, and in order to successfully add a block, Bitcoin miners compete to solve these extremely complex math problems that require the use of expensive computers and an enormous amount of electricity. To complete the mining process, miners must be first to arrive at the correct or closest answer to “the question”. The process of guessing the correct number (aka hash) is known as proof of work. Miners guess the target hash by randomly making as many guesses as quickly as they can, which requires major computing power. If a miner is able to successfully add a block to the blockchain, they will receive 6.25bitcoins as a reward. As it requires so much computing power, server farms and cooling systems, etc. miners exist to ease that load of work to successfully keep the bitcoin blockchain “alive” and well. This is the equivalent of land with a lot of gold (found through explorative methods) in a country where the government allows resourceful companies to mine for gold, even though the process of equipment is heavy and energy-wise intense and the chance of discovery (“the question”), leading to a mine being developed (new hash) is very low (less than 0.1%), miners still take a crack at it. Hope that made sense, moving on to my story.

Musen & Elefanten, a local bar in Copenhagen, was the first business to accept bitcoin as payment for beers and drinks in Denmark, and that became the place we met and talked about bitcoin in the early days.

Known today as Coinify was earlier founded by Kris Henriksen, when the company was known as BIBS (Bitcoin Indbetalings Service) he developed and built an app solution to handle bitcoin payments for the bar. Later in May 2014 Kris and Lasse Birk Olesen from another local company Bitcoin Nordic merged the two companies and co-founded Coinify together with Hans Henrik Hoffmeyer and Mark Højgaard. The latter two are still in the company today as COO and CEO. Hans Henrik also plays a big part in the regulation of crypto in Europe, and through his engagement in The Blockchain and Virtual Currencies Working Group they have helped form the MiCA. Voyager Invest acquired Coinify in an $84 million deal in 2021. Coinify stayed as a single entity under the same brand and leadership. Until 2021 I was part of the company as an external consultant. 

Coinify is the number 1 virtual currency payment provider in Europe, operating in 180+ countries and territories in operation, with 2.5 millon+ registered traders worldwide, and 65 global payment solution providers integrated. Today more than 100.000 businesses and millions of customers around the world are using their solution to handle payment with +15 crypto assets. They are today the backbone of many big and known crypto companies where they handle fiat on and off-ramp solutions, payments gateways, and credit card payments. For many years Blockchain.com was one of their clients. Blockchain.com is a cryptocurrency financial services company. The company began as the first Bitcoin blockchain explorer in 2011 and later created a cryptocurrency wallet that accounted for 28% of bitcoin transactions between 2012 and 2020.
 
In the first couple of years, the blockchain and bitcoin community in Denmark wasn't particularly big, but through the years it has grown and there have been founded many of the biggest players in the industry here in our country outside Denmark, but with danish founders, investors and developers. Just to name some, Chainalysis, Reality+, MAKER DAO, DigiShares, Bitcoin Suisse, OpenLedger, Coinify, ARYZE, and Concordium. Also in the legal aspect, we have outstanding experts like Samar Law, Penning's legal partner, and Lawyer Nikolaj Juhl Hansen, and the community keeps growing.

Back in 2010, I got my first miner, at that time it was simple, install a wallet app called “bitcoin-Qt” and off we go. The first bitcoin wallet was a full client, which meant you had to download the entire blockchain history for it to synch. This wasn’t an issue, to begin with, since there was precious little history to record, although the synchronization period swiftly expanded. Reviewing the wallet in 2012, Vitalik Buterin wrote: “Because it is a full node, the client must download the entire (currently 6 gigabytes) blockchain to operate, which can take up to a few days the first time you start the client and several minutes to an hour every time you start the client afterward if you do not keep it running constantly.” Today, the BTC blockchain is approaching 430 GB. life data here

I was an official part of the blockchain and was mining Bitcoins. That simple. I used my MacBook Air generation 1, and the CPU power it had. Later I was building real mining rigs, That’s what these self-build machines of graphic cards (GPUs), and stuff from an ordinary gaming computer were called. We started mining bitcoins on a big scale. In 2013 after we had tried a lot of different solutions to mine as many Bitcoins as possible from gaming shops, friends’ home computers, and laptops at the office, we ordered our first professional industrial manufacturer Butterfly Labs, Bitforce SC 60 bitcoin miner, pricetag 32 Bitcoins. Yes, with a price tag today $ value of +600.000$. 
 
The problem was that Butterfly Labs shipped so many miners out that the difficulty level on the blockchain skyrocketed and it ended up mining about 5 Bitcoins before we shut it down. Hmm, we had to find a new solution and fast, if we were going to be a part of the validation process of the bitcoin blockchain. I got an idea, at that point I did not know that this became one and maybe the first cloud mining solution out there. We started Cryptomine an online-based bitcoin miner-leasing service. Users were able to lease a part of a miner and get a percentage of the bitcoins we mined. The concept was simple, we buy a lot of miners and “sell” 75 % of the hash/power they provided to the network, we used the last 25 % to cover the running costs and our income, and everyone was happy and had a chance to contribute to the network. 

I found a manufacturer in Switzerland and ordered 10 machines with each 2,8 T/hash mining power. We sold the first +100 contracts the first evening we launched. Unfortunately, the manufacturer in Switzerland lead us down later with a large shipment and went bankrupt and we had to shut the operation down. At that point, we sold merely 1000 contracts up front for the next delivery of miners to cover the upfront payment of the miners. We ended up paying back all the customers with our own bitcoin and money and sold the rest of our mining fleet. We ended up getting some of our bitcoin back that we had put in deposits for the miners we ordered. We learned a lot about running a mining pool from our time in Cryptomine. Years later when Dash came to market, a clone of bitcoin, launched a new way of mining called POS, proof of stake, we started Stakem and ran masternodes for + 30 different blockchains. I will get back to that later.

Penning Down The Thoughts: The first miner

Another drop from co-founder and CEO, Jimmie Steinbeck, reminiscing to The Pen Team about the birth of the Blockchain technology. While the technology has been on everybody's lips, since everyone knew about bitcoin, no one really fully understood it. It's tried and trialed in various industries, failed for some succeeded for many. Here's a breakdown of what it is, how it works, and what it means for the future. Enjoy the read.

So, what if those slow and expensive middlemen with their multiple ledgers could be replaced with a giant database synchronized over the Internet? That's the big idea behind Bitcoin and more than 12.000 crypto assets out there today, and it's run by a decentralized global network of powerful mining computers and regular laptops.
 
﻿The technology likely to have the greatest impact in the next few decades has arrived. And it's not social media. It's not big data. It's not robotics. It's not even AI. You'll be surprised to learn that it's the underlying technology of digital currencies like Bitcoin. It's called the blockchain. 
 
Blockchain, Now it's not the most sonorous word in the world, but I believe that this is now the next generation of the internet and that it holds vast promise for every business, every society and for all of you, individually. You know, for the past few decades, we've had the internet of information. And when I send you an email or a PowerPoint file or something, I'm actually not sending you the original, I'm sending you a copy. And that's great. 
 
This is democratized information. But when it comes to assets – things like money, financial assets like stocks and bonds, loyalty points, intellectual property, music, art, a vote, carbon credit and other assets sending you a copy is a really bad idea. 
 
If I send you 100 dollars, it's really important that I don't still have the money and that I can't send it to you. This has been called the "double-spend" problem by cryptographers for a long time. So today, we rely entirely on big intermediaries and middlemen banks, the government, big social media companies, credit card companies and so on – to establish trust in our economy. And these intermediaries perform all the business and transaction logic of every kind of commerce, from authentication, and identification of people, to clearing, settling and record keeping. And overall, they do a pretty good job. But there are growing problems. 

For starters, they're centralized. That means they can be hacked, and increasingly are – JP Morgan, the US Federal Government, LinkedIn, Home Depot and others found that out the hard way. They exclude billions of people from the global economy, for example, people who don't have enough money to have a bank account. They slow things down. It can take a second for an email to go around the world, but it can take days or weeks for money to move through the banking system across a city. And they take a big piece of the action 10 to 20 percent just to send money to another country.

So for the first time now in human history, people everywhere can trust each other and transact peer-to-peer. And trust is established, not by some big institution, but by collaboration, cryptography and by clever code. And because trust is native to the technology, I call this, "The Trust Protocol." Now, you're probably wondering: How does this thing work?

Assets, digital assets like money to music and everything in between are not stored in a central place, but they're distributed across a global ledger, using the highest level of cryptography. And when a transaction is conducted, it's posted globally, across millions and millions of computers. And out there, around the world, is a group of people called "miners." These are not young people, they're Bitcoin miners. They have massive computing power at their fingertips, 10 to 100 times bigger than all of Google worldwide. These miners do a lot of work. And every 10 minutes, kind of like the heartbeat of a network, a block gets created that has all the transactions from the previous 10 minutes. 

Then the miners get to work, trying to solve some tough problems. And they compete: the first miner to find out the truth and validate the block, is rewarded in digital currency, in the case of the Bitcoin blockchain, with Bitcoin. And then this is the key part, that block is linked to the previous block and the previous block to create a chain of blocks. And everyone is time-stamped, kind of like with a digital waxed seal. So if I wanted to go and hack a block and, say, pay you and you with the same money or change a settlement or any legal document stored as data, I'd have to hack that block, plus all the preceding blocks, the entire history of commerce on that blockchain, not just on one computer but across millions of computers, simultaneously, all using the highest levels of encryption, in the light of the most powerful computing resource in the world that's watching me. Tough to do. This is infinitely more secure than the computer systems that we have today. 

When I pay my friend in crypto assets such as Bitcoin, what's happening is that I use my key to open my wallet, and then instruct the network to send Bitcoins to his address. Most Bitcoin apps today use QR codes to identify an address. You scan it, then swipe to use your key, and approve the transaction. with biometric scanning software in smartphones today it’s easier than ever. This information is shared throughout the global network “The Blockchain” within seconds.

Back in the day, there were no apps and QRcode or biometric scanning software, you had to take your laptop with you or use paper wallets and “remember” your 25+ digits private key.

Using Bitcoins blockchain it´s every 10 minutes or so, one miner using energy beats all the others in a contest to solve a very difficult math problem. That miner is authorized to arrange the most recent transactions into a structured block and is rewarded in Bitcoins for this work. The protocol is called POW - Proof of Work. Today there are no single miners, but mining farms and mining pools, where hundreds of thousands of single miners are working together to get the next block and rewards.

All the data contained inside each block is represented by a checksum. The miner now adds the new block to the previous one. That's why it's called the blockchain. Now the ledger will be updated globally. The checksums of the previous block match the beginning of the new one, which is baked together forever. It's impossible to tanker with the data inside the block without changing the checksums and breaking the chain. This immutability is the first rule of Bitcoin, It means one can never change what was once recorded in the blockchain, or spend the same coin twice. That's also called censorship resistance, and it's critical to Bitcoin being used as real money.

A blockchain is a digital ledger or database where encrypted blocks of digital asset data are stored and chained together, forming a chronological single source of truth for the data. Digital assets are distributed, not copied or transferred. The goal of blockchain is to allow digital information to be recorded and distributed, but not edited. In this way, a blockchain is a foundation for immutable ledgers, or records of transactions that cannot be altered, deleted, or destroyed. The basic application of the blockchain is to perform transactions in a secure network. That's why people use blockchain and ledger technology in different scenarios. There are 4 types of blockchain: Public Blockchain, Private Blockchain., Hybrid Blockchain and Consortium Blockchain, each one of these platforms has its benefits, drawbacks, and ideal uses.
 
To validate transactions you need a synchronized wallet and specially designed computers using ASIC chip or GPU power hardware. The difficulty level of the blockchain made it almost impossible to get a block on your own. In the next post we will dig deeper into this. 

“Penning for the thoughts” is a series compiled by the CEO and Co-Founder of Penning, Jimmie Hansen Steinbeck. A compilation of his vast experience, knowledge, failures, successes, know-how & ideas. Jimmie has spent the last decade (almost since the birth of bitcoin), working in the crypto, blockchain (now known as Web3) space, as an investor, entrepreneur, and expert advisor to numerous crypto companies.

Penning Down The Thoughts: The birth of Blockchain

Another drop from co-founder and CEO, Jimmie Steinbeck, reminiscing to The Pen Team about the rise of Bitcoin. Bitcoin has for some been a meteoric rise to riches, and for others high-powered mechanism for yield, and few a means of payment. Bitcoin was the initial use case for the blockchain technology and has since its inception in 2008 changed the world economy forever. The recent market sentiments show divided attention to what some call a digital asset, others a payment currency and few a decentralized catalyst for a new economy. Read on, to understand what it is, what it means and how it works. 

During the financial crisis in 2008, “Satoshi Nakamoto” published this 9-page white paper: “Bitcoin a peer-to-peer electronic cash system”. 

What is bitcoin? Bitcoin is the world's first cryptocurrency, and it works because of the world's first public blockchain network. What does bitcoin do, it's simple it lets you send and receive value to and from anyone in the world using nothing more than a computer and an internet connection

Digitally bitcoin is the world's first globally accessible public money. Is it perfect? nope, neither was email when it was invented in 1972. Bitcoin's not the best money on every margin it's yet accepted everywhere it's not used often to quote prices and it's not always a stable store of value, but it is working and the mere fact that it works without trusted intermediaries is impressive it's a computer science breakthrough, and it will be as significant for freedom prosperity and human flourishing as the birth of the internet and bitcoin is just the beginning. 

If we can replace private payments infrastructure then we can replace other private choke points to human interaction as well now why should we want to build more public infrastructure why should we embrace blockchains over corporate intermediaries why should we tolerate their inefficiencies and work to make them better. 

Before I knew all that, we have to go back, all the way back to 2010 when I was introduced to Bitcoin for the first time and tried to get as much information about it as possible. There was not much help to get true the internet and Google. I had to go to “the dark web” and as told earlier, I was not a computer nerd, so it wasn’t easy to get the information I was looking for. 

I had so many questions, how does it work, what is a wallet, an address, private and public key, what is the blockchain and where can I get Bitcoins from? After spending months in fora, setting up computers to “mine” bitcoin and just spending every free second I had talking and thinking about this new space, Friends started asking about it and I tried to explain it as well as I could.

Each one is a virtual safety deposit box that only you can open with your key. That’s your PRIVATE KEY, you never give it to anyone, ever.

And there are more addresses in this virtual vault than stars in all the universes. The doors to these boxes are transparent. everyone can see inside them but no one knows the owner. 
Then I showed them my wallet and make a transaction. 

Here's one with digital assets, “1 Bitcoins”. Sending them from one box to another is what's called a Bitcoin transaction, these digital coins can only exist inside these transparent address boxes, can't be copied, and can't ever leave the vault.

And this vault is owned by no single entity. You don't need permission from a government, a bank, or a corporation to use it. For early adopters of Bitcoin, it was all about global peer-to-peer electronic cash.

I then helped set up a wallet and send some bitcoin to them, so they could see it in their own wallet and “play” with it, sending it and receiving it. 

Today I don´t believe that bitcoin became the peer-to-peer electronic cash system that it was initially supposed to be, it has changed, and there are many reasons why. A dear friend Jack, the CEO of ARYZE once said as we as so many times before discovered the development of Bitcoin and its useability in an everyday payment scenario. Transaction cost for users, but also the cost of running the blockchain and validating transactions.

I think the ASIC miners played a huge influence. I think that was kind of the beginning of the end of what bitcoin was initially supposed to be, but that does not mean that bitcoin is worthless, it’s just in my view something else than a peer-to-peer digital version of cash. In my view today it is more of an energy harvesting coin used to monetize excess electricity that we cannot yield today so at night when the volcanoes are still hot, or the geo earth systems are still active or the windmills are still spinning the wind turbines let's capture that energy and use that to mine because it's wasted energy anyway.”  - Jack Nikogosian, CEO & Co-founder of Aryze.io

I couldn’t agree more with him. I believe that running the bitcoin blockchain and validating the transactions shut as it was from the beginning, had stayed with the users. The users that all have a synchronized wallet to send and receive bitcoins are also the validators of the network. Not as it is today with the big “farms” of specialized computers, whit only one goal, “profit”. Getting as many bitcoins as they can sell on exchanges to pay the running costs and make a profit. I still think the technology behind bitcoin and how it has been running seamlessly for the past 14 years is impressive. but as Jack said, today it´s something different than it was back then. So to wrap it up I think this Reddit user nailed: it.

“r/Bitcoin u/sleepapneainvestor 37dS3 2 93 93 1 1
I think I finally understand bitcoin. It’s a silent project that operates in the background. There’s no face to it. The founders created it and walked away. It’s like an elegant clock set into motion that continues to tick. There’s no promise of some complex protocol to come 3, 5, or 10 years down the road. It does what it’s supposed to now without self-promotion from the founders. Since it doesn’t need self-promotion to thrive, it doesn’t fall victim to the vices of marketing from greedy, charismatic leaders, with overly complex projects. Sure, there’s Saylor and Novogratz that sometimes fall into that role. But bitcoin doesn’t need them to survive and won’t need them when they die. The project works now. It does what it’s supposed to and it’ll continue to do what it’s supposed to. It’s the money of the future of our science fiction novels. There are no Krypto Kris marketing shitty debit cards. There’s no charismatic Do Kwon doing a Forbes, Steve Jobs photo shoot with a black t-shirt and a white background. There’s no J Powell magically expanding the money supply with a Cobol-fueled wand, creating a 9 trillion USD balance sheet out of thin air. BTC takes out the corruption of humans because the humans that created it stepped away. Sure, people will build corrupt systems around it, but BTC itself is a simple, pure, and elegant vehicle silently ticking away in the background until the ticking becomes so loud that no one can ignore it.”  - Reddit user

The next article will be about the Blockchain and why it’s “more” important than Bitcoin. And even how they are equally important, for the “Bitcoin a peer-to-peer electronic cash system” Bitcoin isn’t that important for blockchain itself, or is it?

Penning for your thoughts is a series compiled by the CEO and Co-Founder of Penning, Jimmie Hansen Steinbeck. A compilation of his vast experience, knowledge, failures, successes, know-how & ideas. Jimmie has spent the last decade (almost since the birth of bitcoin), working in the crypto, blockchain (now known as Web3) space, as an investor, entrepreneur, and expert advisor to numerous crypto companies.

Penning Down The Thoughts: The Rise of Bitcoin

Jimmie is back again this week after explaining to The Pen Team how money works, the basic anatomy of it, and what it means for society. For those of you who didn’t already know, Penning (directly translated from google) means Money. The back story is that Penning was the first coin denomination in the Nordics in the early 1600s, where a single Penning was 100% silver. Over time, it “deteriorated” down to 10% silver and only the King was entitled to print/denominate currency in the society. Fast forward to the 2000’s Penning is bringing the power back to the people, giving them control of your money with direct and tangible value. From Penning, the words, Pfennig, Penny, Pennies, and Pence were coined (pun not intended) as well. Have a good read. 

THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MONEY AND FIAT CURRENCIES

 Let's start slowly with the basics of money and its creation. The total value of all the world's money is about $130 trillion. What you probably didn't know is that each new fiat currency like the dollar, euro, pound, etc. is created by governments and banks as debt, which needs to be paid back by someone in the future with added interest. That's why there isn't enough money to repay all that debt, and there never will be.

All of the world's money is already digital, basically, just entries on a ledger, usually managed by a bank. Only a small portion exists as physical currency like cash notes or coins. There are still a lot of countries where cash money is still a fundamental way to pay for goods and services in the east, but also in Europe and in the US cash money is still the preferred means of payment and money transactions. In Denmark about 98 % of all money transactions are digital and I believe that’s also the reason why digital assets on the blockchain haven’t had a breakthrough here even though many leading companies in the blockchain and digital asset industries are from Denmark or have founders and lead developers from Denmark. 

But what is money actually, the way we know it today? 

There are basically 4 different types of money, commercial money, fiduciary money, commodity money, and fiat money here's what they are:
 
Commercial bank money consists mainly of deposit balances that can be transferred either by means of paper orders (e.g., checks) or electronically (e.g., debit cards, wire transfers, and Internet payments). Some electronic-payment systems are equipped to handle transactions in several currencies.
 
Fiduciary cash, currency, or money, alludes to banknotes and coins available for use in the economy. This is the liquidity accessible to financial actors to do exchanges. It is a method of payment. Cash is a substantial or tangible property, not at all like scriptural cash which is insignificant.
 
Commodity money is gold and silver coins. Gold coins were valuable because they could be used in exchange for other goods or services, but also because the gold itself was valued and had other uses. Commodity money gave way to the next stage-representative money.
 
Fiat money is backed by a country's government instead of a physical commodity or financial instrument. This means most coin and paper currencies that are used throughout the world are fiat money. This includes the U.S. dollar, the British pound, the Indian rupee, and the euro.
 
The Central bank creates money by purchasing securities on the open market and adding the corresponding funds to the bank reserves of commercial banks. Banks then increase the fiat money supply in circulation even more by making loans to consumers and businesses.

So, suppose you deposit $1,000 into your bank account, maybe as a salary or gift, and then you pay $200 in taxes (unless you’re in Europe or Denmark), $500 for rent, $200 for bills, shopping, general costs of living, shopping so on and so forth. Whether you use credit cards, debit cards, local payment solutions like Mobile Pay, or bank wire transfers, they're all just pluses and minuses in different digital ledgers. That's why there's technically (almost) no need for physical money in our day-to-day lives.

Money is basically an “I owe you”, certificate, that the bank is giving to you. Even though it’s cash money, it´s still owned by the Government. That´s also the reason that you are not allowed to destroy cash money. Worldwide we have about 180 different fiat money in the world circulating in 197 countries. 

Fiat money (from Latin: fiat, "let it be done") is a type of currency that is not backed by any commodity such as gold or silver. It is typically declared by a decree from the government to be legal tender. Throughout history, fiat money was sometimes issued by local banks and other institutions.
 
That means as the world gets smaller and through technology, we can reach and travel the world faster, 180 different currencies are getting more complex to handle. Banks must take fees for converting into different local currencies in order to handle the costs of money flow due to all the intermediaries, and as we are stepping into a more digital world, with the entire world being built through Meta and Augmented Reality, it´s also time that our payment system gets more digital as it is now. Back in 2009 a man, woman, or group of individuals have since gone under the synonym “Satoshi Nakamoto” released the first digital asset or digital money as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, that we today know under the name Bitcoin, and that’s what I’ll be talking about next time. 

Penning for your thoughts is a series compiled by the CEO and Co-Founder of Penning, Jimmie Hansen Steinbeck. A compilation of his vast experience, knowledge, failures, successes, know-how & ideas. Jimmie has spent the last decade (almost since the birth of bitcoin), working in the crypto, blockchain (now known as Web3) space, as an investor, entrepreneur, and expert advisor to numerous crypto companies.

Penning down the thoughts: The Anatomy of Money

Penning down the thoughts is a series compiled by the CEO and Co-Founder of Penning, Jimmie Hansen Steinbeck. Penning is the first self-managing digital asset open-trust fund, working with blockchain infrastructure and codified protocols to make the investment in DeFi and digital assets transparent, easy, and safe. Working in a fully compliant and regulated framework to secure the safe and easy investment we provide the knowledge, tools, and platform to step into the next big thing in the financial industry.  Jimmie has spent the last decade (almost since the birth of bitcoin), working in the crypto, blockchain (now known as Web3) space, as an investor, entrepreneur, and expert advisor to numerous crypto companies. This series is a compilation of Jimmie’s vast experience, knowledge, failures, successes, know-how, and ideas. The Pen team sat down with Jimmie to bring you the first piece of the series puzzle, talking about the birth of blockchain and what it means for business and society. Enjoy your read.

Blockchain is bigger than the Iron Age, the Renaissance, and the Industrial Revolution. Affecting the entire world, and we’re only in the early stages of what’s coming. I believe that we are still playing around in the sandbox, trying to figure out what this new technology can bring to the table in our already digital and “small” world. 
 
In the modern world, how is it possible to live in a society where technology and science enable people to own autonomous cars, while in other parts of the world societies don’t even have access to clean water? And can blockchain narrow the gap and give more people in the world a better life and equal living standards? 
 
Since 2010, I've been researching blockchain technology, digital assets, and the market and co-founded several blockchains and crypto services-based companies. I have spoken to the brightest minds in the industry. I’ve Seen ideas evolve into groundbreaking solutions that will change the world in the future, but I have also witnessed laws being made because of a lack of knowledge or simply because a rule can´t be made before there is something to make a rule about, thus serving no purpose. 
 
Throughout the years, I’ve been involved in this space, many have asked me to explain Bitcoin and what it is. Still, today there are many misunderstandings and confusion about whether “bitcoin is blockchain” or “all blockchains bitcoins”. What is the difference and how does it work? 

Cryptocurrencies, or digital assets and blockchains, are everything you don't understand about money combined with everything you don't understand about computers and technology. I´m not the most technical guy and that sometimes makes it easier to educate and convey in a simple way, but it also makes it a lot harder when you don’t understand the basics of money and computer science. My knowledge over the past +12 years has gathered into a massive database of deep technical words, slang, and information. But still, I feel that it’s getting harder and harder to make all that’s going on in the space easily explained. To understand digital assets and blockchain and its first use case “digital cash” or “payment system”, you must understand the basics of money. But it’s a lot deeper and more complicated. If you are ready I will take you down the rabbit hole. There will be things you don’t get and think are just silly and weird, but everything has its place in the evolution of the blockchain and Web3. We are moving fast, and everything is changing all the time. Whatever we were working on last year, might already be outdated and redundant today. This makes this industry a living digital organism feeding on the willingness and courage of thousands of founders and developers working in the industry to solve the next big thing.


Together with The Pen team, I have made a new blog post series “Penning down the thoughts”. I will go true to the last decade I have spent in the blockchain and crypto assets space and go deeper into all the different areas. I will discuss and inform you about what’s going on, and what will be the next big thing and I generally try to educate and share my knowledge in this space. We will post a “weekly” part of the series with topics like:

 The first bitcoin community in Copenhagen, The Blockchain

 Bitcoins - Why do they have value at all? 

 What is a s***coin?. And then there’s Ripple 

 THE DAO HACK -  (Ethereum) - ETH and (Ethereum classic) - ETC 

Read what's on the mind's of thought leaders