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I went to the TechCrunch first ever Blockchain conference at Zug on July 6th 2018, and here are my top 10 takeaways on Asia Crypto from my conversations with entrepreneurs and investors there. 1. Because of INBLOCK partner Li Xiaolai’s conversation-leak incident, there is increasing talks amongst the Chinese community that in the second half of the year, the Chinese government may intervene and potentially prosecute individuals that are taking advantage of the Chinese speculators (ICO and exchanges are banned in China, but doesn’t mean Chinese people are not trading and buying elsewhere. A lot of strategic and investment conversation about crypto and blockchain still happens in China and many of these Crypto funds still have their investors based there.) Potential Chinese government intervention in the second half of year. There were accusations of Li in his recorded conversation of calling retail investors dumb and taking advantage of them, which would expose him as someone who is committing fraud and taking advantage of the people. This is very risky because in China, if a large number of people start reporting an individual to the police and say that he has cheated them or made them lose money, the Chinese authority is obligated to take action and prosecute them. This is the exact reason why Li published a response to a few days after the leak and attempted to clear himself. The very first point he highlighted was that he did not call the retail investors dumb. He mentioned that he didn’t explicitly say that he was “taking advantage of the retail buyers”, or 割韭菜 in Chinese, which literally translates into “cutting chives”, with the chives referring to Chinese retail buyers. And that there is no referral of the word “chives” in his recording. He also mentioned several other clarifications such as that there is a misunderstanding of his comment on QTUM and that QTUM is not a fraud project. See the google translated section here. It appears that after Li’s incident, many investors and entrepreneurs in China are looking to stay away from associating too closely with these individuals in fear of potential prosecution risk. 2. I credit this observation to Balaji from Coinbase, as he highlighted that this is the very first time that he saw Chinese investors moving from later-stage into early-stage investing and competing for deals alongside with traditional early stage VC and Crypto-only investors. And I’ve noticed that these Chinese investors are really aggressive. They show up in large groups at Crypto researcher conferences with their checkbooks. However, looking at it from the investor angle, Crypto has also provided significantly more opportunities for non- traditional investors. One early investor with 30 crypto investments told me about his experience in the valley. He point blankly said to me that he originally wanted to invest in AI and traditional tech companies, but there was too much barrier to entry in the traditional VC space. So chances happened that he encountered Crypto and chose the Crypto investing route where the opportunities seemed significantly more fair and meritocratic. For the first time, Chinese investors are showing up in early stage investing. 3. Zug was amazing, primarily because of the people that were there. Some people that you may or may not have known already but I really enjoyed speaking with and are worth following include who understands the US and Europe applied crypto ecosystem really well who has written extensively on applied crypto and security, from Balderton Capital, who has an interesting view on Asia and Europe and from Hyperledger, who has really seen everything under the sun in open-source. Additionally, people with great insights into the Asia Crypto scene include from Coindesk and from Eximchain. Of course, along with the usual suspects that you should definitely follow, CZ from Binance and Balaji from Coinbase. People to pay attention to. Pierre-Edouard Wahl, , Philip Dai an Colin Hanna Brian Behlendorf Joon Ian Wong Hope Liu 4. Chinese entrepreneurs I’ve spoken with don’t really know how to judge the top 10 large market cap companies that many have claimed to be shillcoins. Although they believe that the announcements or partnership currently may not be authentic or real, as these companies never provide much detail, it doesn’t mean they won’t be real down the road, or that they will be shillcoins down the road. These companies have raised so much money that they can build everything the fact. Even the Chinese community aren’t sure about whether the Chinese “shill” coins are actual shillcoins. after 5. With all the talks from me and perhaps others on China’s largest tech companies dominating the blockchain, it’s interesting to hear that Tencent has only explored blockchain investments for a few months and they have one person dedicated to doing so thus far. Nevertheless, Tencent has been working on blockchain projects internally. I imagine figuring out what kind of blockchain projects to invest into and what mechanism to invest into is not going to be an easy feat. Tencent’s blockchain investments. 6. I was told that a “realistic”, or “practical” crypto project to the Chinese implies that it needs to make money for investors, versus a “practical” Crypto project to me as someone who perhaps share the Silicon Valley idealist values means that it should be making an impact of some sort in the world. One Chinese entrepreneur with a team based in the US told me that he was conflicted and felt the need to make sure their tokens appreciate in the short term because his Chinese investors expected to see that, and other investments in their portfolio have been delivering. “Practicality” in Chinese Crypto projects. 7. After speaking to many folks about Asia in Zug, I realized there is a good amount of interest to learn Crypto vocabulary in Chinese. As a result, from tomorrow onwards, every other day, we will include a Chinese vocabulary related to Cryptocurrency in the newsletter. Teaching you Crypto terms in Chinese. SUBSCRIBE 8. I am just starting to learn about Europe but the ecosystem there is developing rapidly and I suspect there will be continuous innovation there. Many local investors I’ve spoken to aren’t very familiar with Asia at all and hope to learn more. Regulations appear in many ways more favorable than the US and Asia i.e.new The primary challenge for Europe from my conversations is that there are so many different countries and different cultures in the continent, so it will take more effort and time to go to market to achieve the same scale as the US and China. Europe doesn’t really understand Asia, but that is ok. Crypto exchange from Switzerland ’s stock exchange. raise is an example of where if your company is doing well, there will be plenty of pre-IPO money available to fund you. Softbank’s is looking to focus more than a 1/3 of its investments in China and they will be taking IPOs out of the market or delaying them. Liquidity has always been an issue but the secondary market is becoming increasingly more mature. This delay or elongated time frame for companies to go public will very much apply to the upcoming group of Crypto companies in Asia. Increasing trend of companies delayed from going public in China. Bitmain’s $400mn Series B $ 100bn fund I met a subscriber of the newsletter who works at Coinbase and it was amazing to have an encounter in person! All the way in Zug!! Thank YOU all for your continuous support of the newsletter. THANK YOU.

Top 10 Takeaways on Asia Crypto from TechCrunch Zug

events, hosted each year in San Francisco, New York, London and Berlin, are awesome gatherings of the most innovative startups that come from all around the world. The air is filled with such a vibrant energy that makes you even more enthusiastic about your own venture.It is a unique opportunity to present your idea to the world, tell the startup community about your product, find new partners and get financing from multiple different sources. We at were not looking for any financing rather our goal was to spread the word about the that allows building without code up to 10x faster. It was our first experience participating in TechCrunch Disrupt yet a very successful one, so we’d like to share some hints and tips about how we did it :) TechCrunch Disrupt startup Zeroqode no-code development technology web and mobile apps FIND A SPONSORING ORGANIZATION — 3–4 MONTHS BEFORE THE EVENT Participation at TechCrunch Disrupt is quite a costly venture, so if you are short on budget you might want to consider investigating whether there is an organization that will sponsor startups to represent your country. Sometimes participations are sponsored by startup accelerators and incubators. Normally these startups are organized into country or accelerator pavilions. START PREPARING — AT LEAST 3–4 WEEKS BEFORE THE EVENT Don’t underestimate the amount of preparation that you’d need to do even if you are going to have just a small table. So once your participation is confirmed you might want to go ahead and start getting everything prepared as soon as possible. THE BOOTH If you are a part of the Startup Alley then all you’ll get is a small round table with 80cm diameter. Not much, right? But with some creative approach you can still get the most out of it. An absolute must is a roll-up banner. Most visitors don’t like to come and ask each startup about what exactly they are presenting. They prefer to understand the main idea by taking a quick look at the visuals and then if they get interested — they approach and talk to you. So make sure that the message on your roll-up is very clear or at least you are sure that it will catch attention of others. Don’t be afraid to be creative and come up with bold statements that will intrigue people, like we did :) Instead of describing in detail what we do we decided to simply write “NO. MORE. CODE.” So people were curious to know what we meant by it. were approaching to find out if they are going to lose their jobs — and we were explaining that it was quite the opposite — we simply want to make their work more efficient. were asking how our technology can help them launch products faster and with leaner budgets. were curious if they can start building functional apps instead of simply static designs. Developers Founders Designers We also printed a few cards with logos of famous and eye-catching web-sites and apps, like AirBNB, Slack, Trello, Instagram etc. and a sign saying “Build your own app ”: without code We have pinned them around the table so that they were visible from various angles. This got visitors even more intrigued and they were wondering whether they can build apps like those hence they were approaching us and asking questions. without code We also printed a card saying “Get your ” and put it on the top of the table — we all love freebies, TechCrunch participants are no exception :) free app template Another thing we did was to put a tablet on the table which was playing a looped recording of no-code app development process. So summing up — catchy roll-up banner, cards pinned to the table, tablet with the video and the Free Templates card created a great impression of what we do. So visitors were paying attention to at least one of the promo elements and then if interested — they looked at all others or just approached us directly. BRANDED T-SHIRTS Not only they help to create a positive image and brand awareness they can attract interest too! Usually the startups get only 1 day to exhibit while the Disrupt event is 2 days. So, the first day we were wearing these t-shirts while roaming around the startup alley and that itself was enough for people to wonder what we are doing and approach us with questions. Our t-shirts were saying “NO. MORE. CODE.” in front and “ Ask me how” on the back. So a few times we were approached with a one word question — “How?” :) Apps without code? My partnerVlad and me at TechCrunch Disrupt PRINTED (OR NOT) MATERIALS Business cards are obvious, so we printed some. A couple of hundred per person should be more than enough. But we decided not to print anything else, because web-site is doing a better job presenting the product and no one likes carrying piles of paper these days. And it’s good for the environment too to avoid printing something that will be thrown in the trash. ON-SITE LEAD CAPTURING We have set up a with a simple email capture form. Once someone enters their email it is automatically added to our list. For that list we configured an onboarding reply template that thanks for visiting us and includes the links to built by Zeroqode. landing page mailchimp free app templates Initially the plan was to get a QR code and put it on the business cards so that people would scan them and be taken to the page. But on the event day we realized that we could get faster results if we ask them to fill it out immediately! Otherwise most of them would simply forget and never return. So after presenting the product on our laptops and answering all questions we opened the site with the email capture form and asked visitors to share their emails to get the links to free templates. That way we captured in one day! (high quality leads which are interested in our product) 72 emails This will also save you time because you won’t have to process the collected cards manually after the fair. WILD CARD & INTERVIEW WITH TECHCRUNCH TechCrunch selects some startups for interviewing, however because there are so many startups exhibiting chances that you will be selected are slim.But Wild Card Winners (Visitors voting for the most interesting startup of the day) automatically get the interview secured. So we decided to go after it and do anything we could to get as many votes as possible.Voting is done through Disrupt mobile app and the attendee can vote only for 1 startup per day. The voting normally opens at 9 am and closes at 1 p.m. So we asked everyone who approached our stand to give us their vote if they were interested… Many agreed because they liked what we do. You can also make some friends there and ask them to support you. Vote for someone on day 1 and ask them to vote for you on the next day (or the other way around). ☝ some visitors don’t install the app and thus it takes time to ask them install it and vote. Only later we realized that we can use the app installed on our phones, sign out and sign in under the other person simply by scanning the QR code on their badge. Then we would look up our company in the list and ask them to press the “vote” button :) That turned out be very helpful because Disrupt Android app wasn’t working on that day and we lost quite some votes just because of that :) Useful Hack — So after we won the Wild Card we were invited on stage for an interview with from Tech Crunch. John Biggs GOOD TO KNOW : Read all the emails from TechCrunch — they are sending various updates, and short notice changes that might be important to you. Also, they will be sending you guidelines, logistics details, the hours, schedules and many other things. On your exhibition day come early (in our case doors opened at 7 a.m., we arrived at about 7:20) Tweet about your startup using TechCrunch official hashtag ( ) #TCDisrupt Install well in advance to find event participants and make appointments before the event. Brella app BONUS MATERIAL :)

How we won the “Wild Card” at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin and got interviewed by TechCrunch

I used to be a regular TechCrunch reader, but I’ve been struggling with their messy and slow UI for a while. As a big fan of cleaner and faster interfaces and inspired by Hacker News, and the early Product Hunt, I wanted to spend a day redesigning TechCrunch. CNN Lite Disclaimer: This is a personal project that may not reflect the views of TC. Designed by and for http://fairpixels.pro Here’s the result: Upvotes The way Reddit, Hacker News, Product Hunt and other platforms use upvotes, helps a good chunk of their users quickly navigate through what’s popular. A website like TC, visited by investors and others that would love to have a quick overview of what’s trending, can dramatically improve the way people navigate by seeing what’s popular. Stories The difference between TC compared to HN and Reddit is that the stories are written by their own authors. It’s not a social network that links to other websites, they’re a news publishing company. Having the upvote system, combined with in-house written content, creates a unique experience. One could potentially even follow particular authors who regularly write about the subjects that interests you. Feeds Besides the Popular, Latest and Jobs feeds, there could be feeds that deliver more value to the users. Feeds for deals, events and other categories that could be monetized, while still keeping a clean and fast interface. That’s it. If you’d like to play around with the source files of this design, you can download and use the Sketch files for free. here I’m lead designer at — where we offer unlimited UI design for web and mobile development teams. Fairpixels.pro

Redesigning TechCrunch

I won a couple of tickets from a Pitchoff, so I will be in San Francisco from September 11th until September 14th. Stay tuned for an update on all three days on this blog — from the the most intriguing in Startup Alley to my recap of Marc Benioff’s fireside chat. TechCrunch startups A few highlights I will be looking forward to: One of the most recent IPOs in a slow IPO year From SMS to IPO Jeff Lawson (Twilio) Great show and strikingly similar to reality Satire Valley with Mike Judge (HBO’s Silicon Valley) Will this year birth another unicorn like Dropbox? Startup Battlefield Marc Benioff. Enough said Fireside Chat with Marc Benioff (Salesforce) What’s Reid Hoffman up to after LinkedIn? The New Investment Climate with Reid Hoffman and Josh Elman (Greylock Partners) As always, one of the most prominent investors in Silicon Valley Tweets, Money, Power with Marc Andreessen (a16z) It’ll be interesting to see what Sacks has to say after Zenefits’s fall from glory Looking Forward with David Sacks (Zenefits) A member of the up and coming class of unicorns The New Shop with Apoorva Mehta (Instacart) Follow and for daily updates on stirrings in Silicon Valley through Disrupt SF 2016. this blog Hacker Noon

I will be at TechCrunch Disrupt SF! Highlights coming.

Even though we hear a lot about global digitalization and online conferences, personal communications are still a must and play huge role in business networking and self-promotion. If you are a startup and don’t want to miss out on a chance to be seen and heard, here is a list of the most promising events this fall where you can pitch your business. TechCrunch Disrupt SF September 5–7 When: San Francisco, USA Where: $1,595 — $2,495 Price: If you don’t know TechCrunch, go and read it right now. And if you are following it on the daily basis, you should understand that this conference is one of the biggest and coolest in the world. In addition to outstanding speakers, the conference features Startup Battlefield where you can compete with other companies and gain attention of potential investors. Among the judges will be TechCrunch reps themselves as well as world-known entrepreneurs and VCs. Some of the past-year winners are Dropbox and Yammer — and you can become the next game-changer! And the most awesome part about it? Participation in the Battlefield is 100% free! Os!o Innovation Week September 24–28 When: Oslo, Norway Where: Free Price: This event is considered one of the largest innovation conventions in Europe. It promises about 50 events and always has outstanding speakers — it even was Barack Obama once! For the startups, it offers a chance for pitching from the Innovation Week stage. The competition is held among 100+ companies and strives to find the best startups that focus on sustainability. As they describe it on the website: “Showcasing the best early-stage startups building shit that matters”. Oh, and did we mention that Mike Butcher himself will be among the judges? Bits & Pretzels September 30 — October 02 When: Munich, Germany Where: €399 — €1699 Price: Bits & Pretzels is an application-only festival that features 5 000 + attendees (investors, decision-makers and startup reps) and is actually an amazing place for any startup to learn, network and promote itself. The agenda includes Startup Exhibition, Startup Academy, the Spotlight Stage and many other activity zones, where every startup will have a chance to shine. Don’t forget about awesome speakers, liquid networking and overall fun atmosphere — Bits & Pretzels knows how to add a twist to a professional event. IP EXPO Europe October 3–4 When: London, UK Where: £499 — £650 Price: The conference is among top-notch European events in the sphere of IT. It covers latest IT trends such as block chain, IoT, cyber security and AI-analytics. For startups, attending the conference would be a good chance to learn from the best and find out what’s buzzing in the IT world today. Cisco, Lenovo, Oracle, NSL — all of them and more will be present at the conference as exhibitors and will be available for a chat. As well the conference will be offering free beer– seems like a good alternative to classic refreshments, doesn’t it? FastCompany Innovation Festival October 22–26 When: NYC, USA Where: $799 — $2900 Price: This event is at times compared to Disrupt in terms of size and awesomness. It will feature over 300 speakers, 150 sessions and 10 000 attendees — and it’s one hell of a conference to network, promote yourself and learn new things. The keynote speakers will include reps from such giants as Microsoft, Apple and Airbnb and they will cover a variety of topics, not necessarily related to the IT industry. The conference promotes creativity heavily and is aimed to inspire the guests and let them learn from the best. So you may want to visit the Innovation Festival just to pick up some priceless knowledge and who knows — maybe get the attention of an Apple executive! Written by Natalia Kukushkina

Startup Fall ’18: Where to Promote Yourself This Autumn

Today, Binance, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, . Ella Zhang, head of Binance Lab, announced in an online conference. about the fund, announced plans to establish a US$1 billion fund Per Techcrunch’s report “[The] ‘Community Influence’ fund, , will be aimed at nascent startups and also funds themselves…Binance is looking to back funds with at least $100 million in capital and, of course, a focus on blockchain and crypto. The firm will also launch a Binance Ecosystem Fund which it said will include 20 partners. [Previously], i — a startup that’s advised by Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of encrypted messaging app Signal and Open Whisper Systems — and it is establishing an incubator that will nurture ideas and young projects with financial backing and mentorship. The company revealed today that its first incubation project will be Dache Chain, a new blockchain-based ride-hailing service in China. The company is already getting hype because one co-founder is Chen Weixing, the CEO of app development startup Funcity who initially founded Kuaidi Dache, . The country’s dominant service that .” which will be denominated in Binance’s BNB coin t led a $30 million investment in MobileCoin a Chinese ride-hailing startup that eventually became Didi Chuxing forced Uber’s exit from China Ella Zhang later added on her Twitter: At the moment, the pure cryptocurrency funds are still quite nascent and early-staged, but they certainly have been growing given the increased inflow of capital into cryptocurrencies. This then makes the perfect time to equip funds with BnB tokens. Imagine a fresh and large inflow of capital start to participate on Binance, what do you think will happen? The exchange should see exponentially more volume and larger size of transactions. Upon these new funds joining the ecosystem, they will be deploying BnB tokens to pay for their transaction fees and get discounts on their large trading volume. The number of transactions on Binance should increase substantially and the exchange would become more liquid. This would then attract more funds and more institutional investors to participate, subsequently making it more desirable for companies to list on Binance. This certainly seems like a smart move for Binance and it’s token holders. All the incremental transactions will directly generate more revenue for the company and indirectly benefit the BnB token holders per the aforementioned model. An additional plus for BnB token holders is that the token price should become more stable with more institutional ownership, given that historically assets held by institutional investors are less volatile than those owned by retail investors. At this my point, my two cents is that if other exchanges do not start attracting institutional money and compete on this level, I can imagine a world where Binance becomes magnitudes more large and liquid than any other exchanges, squeezing out all the mid-size exchanges. So if the investing team at Binance executes correctly, it truly feels like we might have a real, global financial ecosystem built on digital coins. Disclosure: I don’t own Binance coins

Binance’s $1bn fund and its first step into institutional investing

Naïveté, hubris, and profound blindness to the lessons of history don’t have a great track record for producing happy outcomes. “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” — Maya Angelou Maybe when we learned that a 19-year old Mark Zuckerberg called 4,000 of his fellow Harvard students , “dumb f$cks”, for trusting him with their personal information, we should have believed him the first time. But those were the halcyon days of 2010, when Facebook was still a private company and many of us who’d first used it when it was open to college kids only were just nearing the ends of our 20s. Back then, some of us on the outside hoped that Facebook would evolve into the Internet’s humanizing, unifying force. We let ourselves believe that if Facebook continued to extend its reach across geographical, national, religious and racial boundaries, maybe it would show us that even though we often disagree about how to get there, all of us want the same things for ourselves and our children: to be safe, to be at peace, to have food and shelter, respect and opportunity and hope. But let’s face some realities: For all of its utopian conceptions of itself, Facebook is a massive, monopolisitic data maw that uses the variable reward mechanisms pioneered by slot machines to feed our brains dopamine while collecting copious amounts of our personal information. With this all-consuming hunger for data on the things that make us tick, Facebook has assembled the biggest, most detailed online identity database and the most powerful media-targeting engine ever known. To any business that has realized that effective content marketing is the single most powerful form of advertising, Facebook’s media targeting capabilites are a boon. As an entrepreneur who understand his target market and knows how produce authentic stories that resonate with it, I know there is simply no better way than Facebook advertising to get my message in front of exactly the right people. But as someone who cares deeply about freedom and human rights and wants them to exist in the future instead of collapsing into some form of AI-powered totalitarianism, my feelings about Facebook are much dimmer. So today, let’s explore one possible logical conclusion of what Facebook has created. In this scenario, Facebook devolves even further from its status as an vanity-powered slot machine that occasionally moonlights in psychological warfare operations into the perfect toolbox for 21st century totalitarianism. Like any projection into the future, this remains speculative fiction…for now. If sensibile, freedom-loving humans get our act together, it can remain that way. The #1 Tool For The 21st Century Totalitarian: Surveillance at Scale Before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the East German communist state, the East German secret police (aka the Stasi) gathered data by hand, relying on stakeouts and a massive network of civilian informants to build detailed files on its targets, whose ranks included pretty much everyone. Under the watchful eyes of the Stasi, whose file cabinets stretched for miles, case agents were responsible for keeping tabs on individuals and groups. Though these agents had large and ever-growing dossiers at their disposal, they were essentially confined to what they could capture on paper and keep in their minds. The 21st century totalitarian has no patience for such an antiquated approach. And why should he? Compared to Internet-scale data collection, the Stasi’s analog methods are slow, inefficient, and prone to lapses in human judgment. No, the 21st century totalitarian demands a more sophisticated way to capture and catalog the activities, psychologies, and political sentiments of the population in real time. Ideally, this would be a place online where people share freely and regularly about themselves. A place just like…Facebook, Instagram, andWhatsApp. Yeah, that’s the ticket. #2: Predictive Behavior Modeling (“Digital Precognition”) To the 21st century totalitarian, ongoing collection of massive amounts of personal data is only part of the equation. Because once you have access to a large, rich and ever-growing online database of human behavior, you need algorithms that can mine its activities and uncover threats to the status quo. Along with potential terrorists, these threats include: Subversives Whistleblowers Radicals If you were a 21st century totalitarian, wouldn’t it be nice if you could build a detailed psychological profile of these types and use your massive identity database and a bit of sophisticated machine learning to detect others in real time? Sure, you’d surface a substantial number of false positives, but it’s nothing some light investigation and/or interrogation from your secret police couldn’t suss out. With such a tool at your disposal, it’d be like having the pre-cogs from Minority Report, but instead of weirdly-psychic humans drugged up and living in a bath, you’d have an All-Seeing Machine. Now, if you’re a grumpy old white, assembling the talent necessary to build such technology would be a challenge. It would be much better if the naive young people from the same company that built your massive surveillance engine were also thoughtful enough to train an AI to mine their users’ posts and flag “troubling psychological tendencies.” You know…something exactly like ? the technology Facebook built into its “suicide warning” bot Yep. #3: Mass Manipulation The 20th century totalitarian relied on absolute control of the flow of information. Writing official textbooks, burning subversive materials, censoring the media, and publishing a non-stop flow of propaganda was simply the way of things. But for the 21st century totalitarian, the fragmentation of TV and the free-form frontiers of the Internet complicates this strategy. Sure, you could just co-opt all the cable news stations, but there are so many other channels! Radio? That’s so 1933. No, while these blunt forms of manipulation may work for Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, they are too obvious to work across an entire nation. Today’s totalitarian demands a more subtle way to influence cultural and political sentiment. He wants the kind of thing you’d have if he got his hands on an algorithmically filtered newsfeed that reached over a billion people. Because see: once you have a way to influence the stories people see every day, you can shape their understanding of reality and their emotional states across geographic, political and economic lines! With such a tool like that, your totalitarian regime would have the edge it needed to pry open the doors of a divided open society and get itself ready for business. Naive Optimism + Hubris + a Profound Lack of Historical Awareness = Facebook, 2016–2018 I don’t know Mark Zuckerberg personally, but I’m willing to believe he imagined that he was setting out to eliminate artificial barriers between people and build a better world. And when I first logged into Facebook in 2004, I thought that’s what it might become too. Even when Facebook made one boneheaded privacy blunder after another, I was willing to chalk it up to youthful mistakes and give the company the benefit of the doubt. But then there was that scandalized us for a couple of weeks back in 2014, when Facebook changed the emotional tone of content showing up in people’s feeds to test the impact it could have on their moods. the mood-influence study The results, not too surprisingly, suggested that Facebook had both the power to manipulate public sentiment and the willingness to run large scale psychological tests without their users’ consent. And when Facebook allowed itself to be weaponized into a global propaganda distribution machine and Zuckerberg reflexively denied his company’s role in the mass-scale psychological warfare operation that played out in 2016? Well, that was the last straw. Or so I thought. Even when I was hopeful about its potential, I’d always vaguely worried that Facebook’s cultural DNA might eventually evolve it into a perfect toolbox for totalitarians. The disclosure of and Facebook’s defensive, ham-fisted response to it just really brings the whole thing home. Cambridge Analytica’s theft of 50 million profiles Because while I am hopeful that the ideals of human freedom and universal human rights will persevere against the paranoia of our modern age, there’s a reasonable case to be made that these ideals could go into hibernation in the relatively near future. Given how easy it is to scare people about the scary-seeming-but-actually-low-risk Ebola, and how quickly our higher-order intelligence shuts off when we are afraid, it is not crazy to think that under the wrong circumstances — like one or two more mass-scale terrorist attacks on major cities — what’s left of the rule of law, free speech, and the US Constitution gives way to something much closer to 1984. If Big Brother were to seize the reins of power, sure, he’d use the cable news the way it’s being used today. But Facebook’s data maw, targeting power and sentiment-manipulation capabilities would be far more insidious. So I’m hitching a ride with the #deletefacebook bandwagon and to delete every one of my historical posts. using this Chrome plugin Care to join me? But here’s one weird fact you’ll never believe: Facebook is not the real problem. In a very real sense, for the scale of the mess we’re all in today. it is is neither accurate nor fair to blame Facebook The explosion of “tribal reality” that washed over America in 2016 showed up loud, bright, and clear in the 2004 Presidential election, when the about 9/11 and the Iraq War. majority of Democrats and Republicans believed two completely different versions of reality Back then, Facebook was barely 9 months old. So while our desire to pin the blame Facebook for dividing Americans into alternative-reality camps is natural and understandable, doing so obscures a much more complicated, painful truth. We need to face the fact that the gasoline of polarization had been gushing onto the floor for years before Facebook scaled to 1.2 billon users and started handing out matches. We may not enjoy admitting it, but the root of the problem is not Facebook. Or Twitter. Or YouTube. The toxic effects they have on our minds, our political culture, and our social norms are merely symptoms of something much more problematic. They are flowers sprouting from the soil of an economic, political, and psychological environment that rewards the people who build the most extractive, monopolistic business models and architect the most addicting products with huge increases in net worth. And yet, even that soil is just a symptom of the much larger, more persistent, and long-lived problem at the root of all of this. The root cause of the majority of our social problems is scarcity…not scarcity of the basic material resources humans need to survive, but scarcity of all the things human beings need to thrive. Rich and poor. White, brown, black, and yellow. Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist, Sikh. Gay, straight, and somewhere in between. Liberal and conservative. Libertarian and authoritarian. Scarcity touches everyone. Billions of human beings from every spectrum of identity and every tribe on Earth are starving for love, freedom, dignity, hope, belonging, and self-respect. These are hardly new developments. We can trace most of them back hundreds, thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of years. Given the chaotic global climate our ancestors faced…which seems to have included massive fluctuations of rainfall that could turn a massive lake into a desert in a single generation and a FREAKIN ICE AGE, some of the most painful forms of scarcity trace back to our species’ earliest days on Earth. But something miraculous has happened over the last 20 years, and it’s gone into high gear in the last 10. For the first time in human history, ALL of the philosophical, psychological, and educational frameworks and just about every technology necessary to create and sustain abundant, low-cost access to energy, water, nutritious food, high-quality education, physical and mental health, transportation, and shelter exists at the same time. Right now, in 2018, we already have everything we need to reduce and possibly eliminate nearly all the waste in our systems. And we can do it all in a way that benefits the planet’s environment instead of harming it and possibly destabilizing it. The obstacles to the widespread deployment of these ideas and technologies are misaligned incentives and scale. And thanks to an extraordinary invention by a strange reclusive figure who calls itself Satoshi, humanity may have a path around those obstacles as well No, that invention is not Bitcoin. It is the blockchain, the much more significant technology that makes Bitcoin possible. In a much bigger upcoming guide to the blockchain, we’ll explore these things as well. The first version of this essay appeared on TechCrunch in 2014 . Revised and updated: 3/20/2018).

How Facebook’s Naive Optimism Built A Toolbox for 21st Century Totalitarianism

Universal Scraper Microservice A scalable universal scraper. Scrape thousands of TechCrunch articles in seconds! This post is part of a series of open source projects that we’ll be releasing in the next while, as described . previously here Scraping I’ve been doing a bit of Machine Learning and a big part of learning how to create different architectures and models is to deal with real-life data. There are plenty of great out there but I wanted to build one from scratch and settled on TechCrunch article titles (to use for a tech-news article title generator). recently datasets There are plenty of ways to scrape simple data like that from public sites such as TC but since we’ve had to do a few scraping jobs before, I set out to build a simple scraper that pulled in public metadata as well as text pulled in using simple queries to the HTML content. Scrape That’s where came in. It’s built on top of and has a simple abstraction around pulling in data from the raw HTML of sites it scrapes, as well as pulling in structured , and metadata. scrape stdlib schema.org Open Graph It’s open source: _scrape - Distributed Scraper_github.com nemo/scrape And you can also use a production-ready version on stdlib . here Scraping Techcrunch Naturally, after building a distributed scraper – it’s rather easy to scrape up a lot of article titles from a site like Techcrunch. Here’s a quick snippet that I used to scrape about 100 pages of Techcrunch archives: And in a matter of seconds: Scraped Techcrunch article names Now to have fun with this data and come up with a few ML models. That’s for another day. Next time you need to scrape a site in a structured way and don’t want to invest in creating the infrastructure for it, feel free to use (or fork) ! scrape If you’d like to keep up with the open-source microservice releases that we’re doing over the next while, follow my posts.

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