Hopium for the Masses

 

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Today’s newsletter is proudly brought to you with the tunes of Feathercoiner DJ Tommy. It is recommended that you read this week’s news while listening to his tunes 🙂
 

DJTOMMY 80S GREATEST DISCO HITS MIX
 
If there’s a problem you are the problem. Execution is at an all time low in our domain and one of the biggest opportunities in the crypto currency space is for people to step up and deliver. We cannot allow ourselves to gain a reputation to the outside world for being a community of lazy dreamers. Right now there are thousands of people in the world all sharing the same idea as you, but very few will have the courage to step up and ship.
 
The dichotomy of thinker and doer is a false dichotomy. When you really listen to history what you hear is that the doers were the thinkers but their thinking was transformed by action that could be witnessed by others. That is the only way your values will be recorded by history, it’s the only way you will be remembered.
 
 

Thank-you for the Music

 
One of those opportunities is for someone to work out how we can compensate artists like musicians for the work they do in a way that feels natural and not as if we are being taxed. At the moment if given a choice many people will consume content without thinking about the author’s needs and with technology like ours I would love to see someone take the lead on this and design an app for Tommy so that people can tip him to listen to his tunes.
 

That’s Tommy from Venezuela, stood by a pot of gold (it’s what people used as money in the olden days)

Try sending that across the internet at the speed of email.
 
I have been in frequent conversations with Tommy on Skype over the last month to work out how we can give him the support he needs. Maybe get him to livestream to a nightclub in London with a FTC tip jar using @UKMark’s SMS Wallet?
 
He faces many challenges due to his local circumstances but I am determined to help him out. It turns out that bandwidth is expensive when it comes to live streaming so I would welcome anyone entrepreneurs and developers to head over to my thread and come up with some ideas about the building of a juke box.
 
This could be something that could be repurposed for other DJs and perhaps you can use Tommy as a beta? One thing I think is true, people will pay more for the chance to experience something in the future than they will if they have already experienced it in the past. And that means the payment structure must be baked in to the user’s natural everyday behaviour. Similar to this site: http://flattr.com/
 
 

The Hive

 
@Ruthie and I met Wendell, the founder of the Bitcoin Hive Wallet at the London Conference all the way back in July (when bitcoin was down at about $80, remember that?) and I was very impressed with his ambition and the design focus he and his team were taking. This is exactly the kind of thing that can help crypto currencies gain mainstream adoption.
 

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Wendell may have been a little modest in our post to us, checkout this integration

If you want to hear Wendell discuss his open source project (that’s right it’s open source as well!) I highly recommend you checkout his interview on Let’s Talk Bitcoin E42. Mac users can download the Beta from the Grab Hive website and we’d love to get a review from one of our resident blogger
 
 

Amsterdam Conference Reloaded

 
And this brings me to the reasoning behind my opening remarks to the newsletter. I was pretty upset to be sent an email last week from the organiser of the Amsterdam Bitcoin Conference telling me and the other speakers that the event had been cancelled.
 

A Honey Badger upon hearing the news that the conference had been ‘cancelled’


Needless to say I wasn’t impressed. So I teamed up with Pikapay and contacted all the speakers and got us to host our own event. Checkout the ad here. Bush, Ruth and I will do our best to make the most of our time in Amsterdam and make sure we get to meet good people like the guys at BIPS.me a Bitcoin payment provider on Friday. If you know anyone in Amsterdam who might be interested please direct to to that post.
 
We will be tweeting out on the #BTCAmsterdam hashtag.
 
 

TL;DR – Hope is not a strategy

 
It is too easy to sit back and talk about other people’s achievements, what’s harder is acknowledging we have something remarkable in us too. I think it comes with understanding ourselves in terms of our possibilities and taking a deep curiosity in the world around us and asking ourselves “how can I have impact?”
 
The opposite of fear is faith in intuition.
 
Today special thanks go to @Ruthie for her contributions to this newsletter.
 
You can follow us on Twitter @Feathercoin to stay up to date.
 
Thank-you for your time.