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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 years ago

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Podcasting "Qualia"

This week on my podcast, I read “Qualia,” my May, 2021 Locus Magazine column about quantitative bias, epidemiology, antitrust and drug policy. It’s a timely piece, given the six historic antitrust laws that passed the House Judiciary Committee last week:

https://doctorow.medium.com/moral-hazard-and-monopoly-42e30eb159a8

The pandemic delivered some hard lessons about quantitative bias — that’s when you pay attention to the parts of a problem that you can do math on, not because they’re the most important, but because you know how to do math.

The most obvious lesson comes from the failure of exposure notification apps, which were supposed to take the place of “shoe-leather” contact tracing, wherein a public health workers establish personal rapport with infected people to help identify others who might be at risk.

Contact tracing is a human process, built on trust: trust enough to talk about the intimate details of your life, trust enough to take advice on how to get tested and whether you should self-isolate.

That’s not what apps do.

Exposure notification apps measure whether a Bluetooth device you registered was close to another Bluetooth device for a “clinically significant” period of time.

That’s it.

They don’t measure qualitative aspects, like whether you were close to an infected person because you were in the same traffic jam in adjacent, sealed automobiles — or whether you were both at the Ft Lauderdale eyeball-licking championship.

And they certainly don’t create the personal rapport that’s needed to understand each person’s idiosyncratic health circumstances and complications — whether they need child care, or are at risk of losing their under-the-table jobs if they self-isolate.

We didn’t want to commit the resources to do contact tracing at scale, we didn’t know how to automate it — but we did know how to automate exposure notification, so we incinerated the qualitative elements and declared the dubious quantitative residue to be sufficient.

It’s the quant’s version of searching for your car keys under the lamp-post because it’s too dark where you dropped them.

It’s not just foolish, it’s also deceptive — quantizing qualitative elements is a subjective exercise that produces numbers that seem objective.

This is where antitrust law comes in. Prior to the neoliberal revolution of the Reagan years, antitrust concerned itself with “harmful dominance,” with regulators asking whether mergers and commercial practices were bad for the world.

Obviously, “bad for the world” is hard to measure. Regulators evaluated claims from all corners: both political scientists worried about the outsized lobbying power of large companies and workers worried about monopolies’ outsized power over wages and conditions got a say.

So did environmentalists, urban planners, and yes, economists, too.

The Chicago School — hard-right conservative economists with cult-like status among Reagan and big business simps — insisted that all this qualitative stuff had to go.

They argued that consideration of qualitative elements left too much up to judges, so two similar companies engaged in similar conduct might get different verdicts out of the antitrust system. This, they said, make a mockery of the notion of “equal treatment before the law.”

Instead, the Chicago Boys — led by Robert Bork, a Nixonite criminal and a sort of court sorcerer to Reagan — demanded that qualitative measures be left behind in favor of a purely quantitative analysis of whether a monopoly hurt “consumer welfare.”

The way you’d measure “consumer welfare” was by checking to see whether a monopoly was making prices go up — if not, the monopoly was deemed “efficient” and thus socially beneficial. Prices are numbers, numbers can be measured.

But that’s not how it worked in practice. When two companies wanted to merge, they could hire a Chicago fixer to construct a mathematical model that “proved” that they resulting megafirm would not raise prices.

No one could argue with this, because Chicago School consultants had a monopoly over building and interpreting these models — the same way court magicians laid exclusive claim to the ability to slaughter an animal and read the future in its guts.

And if the prices did go up? Well, the same Chicago model-makers would be paid to produce a new model to prove that the price-rises were not the result of monopoly, but rather, rising energy costs or higher wages or the moon being in Venus.

Even by their own lights, “consumer welfare” was a failure. Monopolies drive prices up. Amazon Prime is a tool to drive up prices in every store, not just Amazon:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/01/you-are-here/#prime-facie

Apple’s App Store monopoly drives up app prices:

https://www.engadget.com/2019-05-13-supreme-court-apple-app-store-price-fixing-lawsuit.html

Luxxotica bought every eyewear brand and every eyewear retailer and the world’s largest optical lens manufacturer and drove prices up 1000%:

https://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-glasses-lenscrafters-luxottica-monopoly-20190305-story.html

The highly concentrated pharma industry raises prices every single year:

https://patientsforaffordabledrugs.org/2021/01/14/2021-price-hikes-pr/

What’s more, there’s a straight line from “consumer welfare” to price-fixing.

Think about publishing. A decade ago, the Big Six publishers were embroiled in a bid to force Amazon to raise ebook prices, which led to fines and settlements for harming “consumer welfare.”

Today, the Big Six publishers are the Big Four, because Random House, the largest publisher in the world, gobbled up Penguin and Simon & Schuster. When RH, S&S and Penguin were three companies, it was illegal for them to collude on pricing.

But after their mergers, the three former CEOs — now presidents of divisions within an unimaginably giant company — can meet in a board room and plan exactly the same price-fixing strategy, and that isn’t illegal under “consumer welfare” antitrust — it’s “efficient.”

The Chicago School’s “consumer welfare” was only ever a front for “shareholder welfare,” the ability of large firms to avoid “wasteful competition” and extract an ever-larger share of the take for shareholders at the expense of customers, workers and the public.

The entire business of “consumer welfare” is a fraud, starting with Robert Bork’s insistence that a close reading of the US’s four major antitrust laws will reveal that they were never intended to be used for any purpose *other* than consumer welfare protections.

This is manifestly untrue, a Qanon-grade conspiracy that is refuted by the plain language of the statutes, the statements of their sponsors, and the record of the Congressional debates leading to their passage.

Despite the wealth of evidence that US antitrust is not a “consumer welfare” project, neoliberals have insisted that their project was not “reforming” antitrust, but rather, “restoring” it to its original purpose.

It’s a Big Lie, and they know it. That’s why GOP Senators Mike Lee (UT) and Chuck Grassley (IA) introduced “The TEAM Act to Reform Antitrust Law” — a bill intended to neutralize the muscular new antitrust bills that just passed the House committee.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/06/25/the-plan-to-water-down-antitrust-reform/

The bill does two things:

It takes antitrust authority away from the FTC, sidelining the incredible Lina Khan, a once-in-a-generation antitrust scholar who now runs the agency; and

It codifies “consumer welfare” as the basis for US antitrust law.

That second part is the tell: after 40 years of insisting that any rational reading of US antitrust proved that “consumer welfare” was obviously its sole purpose, they’re now introducing a law to *change* its purpose to “consumer welfare.”

Like the Stolen Election lie, they never truly believed this one. The pose of objectivity that quantizing antitrust allowed was never about creating a truly objective standard for competition policy — it was only ever about neutering competition policy.

The thing is, there is a way to integrate both the objective and subjective into policy-making — as was demonstrated by David Nutt’s 2008 leadership of the UK’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, which established the policy framework for a wide range of drugs.

Nutt’s panel of experts rated drugs based on how harmful they were to their users, the users’ families, and wider society. This allowed him to sort drugs into three categories:

Drugs that were dangerous irrespective of your public health priorities;

Drugs that were safe irrespective of your public health priorities; and

Drugs whose safety changed based on whether you prioritized the safety of users, families or society.

Those priorities are a political choice, not an empirical finding. Nutt told Parliament that it was their job to establish those subjective priorities, and once they did, he could objectively tell them how to embody them in the rules for each drug.

This is a beautiful example of how the objective and subjective fit together in policy — and the tale of what happened next is a terrible example of how “consumer welfare” hurts us all.

You see, booze is one of the most concentrated industries in the world. The “consumer welfare” standard let booze companies buy one another until just a handful remain — globe-straddling collosii with ample resources to influence policy-makers.

Nutt, an empiricist, reported just as rigorously on the harms of booze — one of the most dangerous drugs in the world — as he did on other drugs. He was fired for refusing to retract his true statement that tobacco and alcohol were more dangerous than many banned drugs.

Thanks to “consumer welfare” antitrust, the alcohol industry is able to choose who its regulators are, and use their political influence — purchased with the excessive profits of a monopolist — to rid themselves of pesky officials who actually pursue objective policy.

You can read the column here:

https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

And here’s the podcast episode:

https://craphound.com/news/2021/06/28/qualia/

As well a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the @InternetArchive; they’ll host your stuff for free, forever):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_395/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_395_-_Qualia.mp3

And here’s a link to my podcast feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

Image: OpenStax Chemistry: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Figure_24_01_03.jpg

CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en

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merkabacreations-blog · 6 years ago

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Mastery Journal 12.4.2

Mastery: Personal Development & Leadership (Month 1) – During Month 1 of the program, we read Mastery by Robert Greene. This was very inspirational reading and left me feeling enthusiastic about the program. The main lesson I took from the reading was that the road to mastery is not one that is formulaic. Even the great masters that came before us hit bumps in the road and faced obstacles and set-backs. Masters are made, not born. Even those born with genius level talents had to work hard to achieve their mastery. Also, the road to mastery is all about finding yourself; discovering your true desires and motivations. I learned to put my goals into perspective this month with tasks like the Mastery Timeline and Brainstorm/Research worksheet.

Defining Client Needs (Month 2) – During Month 2 we began brainstorming/researching designs for our city logos. We also began to do peer critiques starting this month. The feedback from instructors and classmates was very beneficial and helped me to look at my artwork objectively. This month I learned new techniques to overcome artist’s block and learned new ways to approach designing.

Brand Development (Month 3) – This month we digitized our best logo sketches from the previous month, we produced mood boards, we continued peer critiques and completed SWOT (Strenghts, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) exercises. This month taught me what a brand truly is. Branding is much more than just a logo. The brand carries the value of the company. The brand is everything that embodies the company. The brand is the public image that acts as a representative for the company.

Effective Copy Writing (Month 4) – This month we produced ad comps for a non-profit organization. We developed personas which allowed us to get in the minds of our audience/consumer. This is a great tool for companies to use, so that they can determine what the best imagery and language is to persuade their audience to act. We also worked on developing new/improved taglines for the non-profits. This month taught me the importance of copy writing as a designer, because many designers get tasked with writing the copy in their designs, as not all agencies/clients will employ a separate person to write. It is critical for designers to be versatile, diverse and adaptable in this field.

Design Research (Month 5) – This month we produced web design comps for a made-up non-profit organization. The objective of the website was to not only promote a charity concert, but educate people about the goals of the organization (saving sea turtles). We came up with three mood boards and chose the strongest of our designs to be the base for our final web comp. Working on mood boards and comps in previous months definitely helped prepare me for this project. This month taught me the importance of having a strong rationale, or reason behind design choices, and having the research to back up your claims. This makes it easier, as a designer, to express your ideas to your clients. You’ll seem more credible and reliable with well-well-researched rationales. This month I also became reacquainted with design elements such as informational hierarchy, contrast, shape, line, etc. All of these elements of design help designers convey our messages more clearly to our audience, in ways that are usually universally understood.

Organizational Structures (Month 6) – This month we learned about different animation techniques. We got to animate subjects of our choice. I chose to use Kinetic Typography to animate the words of a poem I wrote many (many) years ago. We used Story journals, boards and maps to help us stay organized and truly tell compelling stories that the audience could connect with. This month definitely proved to be a learning curve for me as I was not very familiar with applications like After Effects. Where I felt like I had shortcomings, I was detrained to overcome them in the following months.

Design Strategies (Month 7) – This month we came up with an 8-week timeline for our thesis project. I learned to prioritize projects by level of important and relevance, which helped keep me from being overwhelmed. We also had periodic postings that showed our progress. Instructor and peer critiques along with the frequent check-ins helped me stay on task. Some techniques I learned from the previous month came in handy while I animated my logo sting. Sketching, animatics and story boarding were useful tools during this month.

Design Integration (Month 8) – This month we continued the project started in the previous months. I kept making strides in my animation and acquired new competencies in applications like After Effects and Keynote. My confidence was improving compared to month 6 when we were first introduced to animation techniques. In addition to my logo sting, I animated my web comps and made a promotional video which featured parallax imagery. This month I wrote one of my favorite research papers about Innovation where I challenged traditional means of education.

Multi-Platform Delivery (Month 9) – This was our last month of development for our thesis project. By the end of this month, it was nice to see all the progress I made on the Travel Campaign since the start of Month 7. It was interesting to see how it developed and grew from just the small idea to animate my logo. This month I also wrote my Inspiration Essay where I argued that there are no original ideas and wrote about methods designers should take to try to avoid plagiarism, even unintentionally.

Measuring Design Effectiveness (Month 10) – This month taught me the importance of testing a project while also teaching me how to word and develop questions which test the effectiveness of design choices. I had mixed feelings about the results at the end of the month, however. I was able to see my shortcomings and where I made mistakes when developing my questions. For example, vetting my test subjects before hand would have saved me time and I would not have had to devote so much time to demographic questions that had little or nothing to do with testing the effectiveness of the design. I learned that more planning should go into developing questionnaires for measuring design effectiveness.

Presentation of Design Solution (Month 11) – This month we were tasked with making a Wix website where we would showcase our strongest projects and demonstrate our claim to mastery. At first I was worried I wouldn’t have enough content or substantiated research to argue my claim to mastery. However, as I continued to populate my website with more of my work, I began to appreciate my journey in the program. In addition to the thesis presentation, we also improved our portfolios and posted reflections. The improvements to the portfolios is important because it showcases my work in a more professional light for potential employers.

Professional Practice (Month 12) – This month we did a lot as we prepared to exit the program. For one, we researched many different things that could land designers in legal trouble. From there we found solutions and alternatives that we could employ in order to avoid questionable situations. We also updated our resumes and cover letters, and learned techniques that attract hiring managers’ attention. Lastly, we designed experience maps which mapped out our journeys in the program, and explored what we did, felt, and thought throughout the whole experience. This last month left me feeling enthusiastic again, much like the first month did, because I am excited to see what the future holds in store for me. Researching jobs in my field and seeing the credentials they look for, left me feeling confident in my abilities and grateful for my previous experiences. With a couple of more years in the field I can start applying and qualifying for higher level positions. I feel very prideful when I look back over the course of this program. I’m extremely proud of my body of work and I’m glad I did not get too down, even in the moments when I felt overwhelmed and was doubting myself. I’m glad I kept pushing through and I’ve finally reached this moment.

In regards to my Thesis Presentation:

Month 1 taught me the importance of setting goals. One goal I set that month was improving my animation skills. Over the course of the program I did just that, and it proved to be crucial for my thesis project and presentation. A personal triumph I achieved this month was the Video Presentation. I wrote a script, memorized it and did several takes. Public speaking and speaking on camera makes me nervous, but I was glad I was able to overcome my shyness. Brushing up on my video editing skills was also helpful for later months in the program.

Month 2 taught me the importance of research in the earlier stages of designing. This helped me with every design project in subsequent months. Drawing sketches and doing word maps are techniques I’ll take with me beyond the program

Month 3 taught me that all details are important, even the small details. Small mistakes tend to add up and bring down the overall quality of the design. Developing a brand came in handy while developing the Travel Campaign for Marrakesh (which ended up being the bigger part of my thesis project.

Month 4 - The personas and ad comps were important accomplishments to me because comps weren’t things I was used to producing in the development stages of design but helped me out when producing web comps later in Month 5 and during the thesis project. The personas also came in handy when I wanted to determine who my audience was for the Travel campaign.

Month 5 - Web comps and web design research taught me what users want and don’t want to experience when visiting a website. I made sure to make my web comps for the Marrakesh campaign convenient and self-evident for my intended audience. My greatest accomplishment this month was my scrolling web comp which simulated a one-page website design.

Month 6 taught me that there is always new things to learn. I felt a little discouraged this month but after makings some breakthroughs, it left me determined to do better for the thesis project. Every part of my thesis project incorporated animation because I wanted to get better at it.

Months 7,8 and 9 taught me the importance of listening to your critiques and sticking to a plan and staying organized. My greatest accomplishments this month were my logo animation, promotional video and animated web comp. These projects proved I had acquired competencies in the things that were giving me trouble earlier in the program.

Month 10 taught me that what can be perceived as a successful design does not always translate on paper, especially if it is not tested correctly with the right group. One triumph I had during this month was my presentation of my results on Behance. I was able to design a really nice presentation despite my questionnaire having some noticeable shortcomings.

My experience map is modeled after my “workspace” as I call it. It is the state I most often find myself when I’m working or studying. I put the map on graphing paper to convey the high and low points of my mastery journey.

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thisdaynews · 5 years ago

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The Other Brother Duo That Brought Us the Modern GOP

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/the-other-brother-duo-that-brought-us-the-modern-gop/

The Other Brother Duo That Brought Us the Modern GOP

First, the brothers made a fortune in oil; then, they used it to attack the Democratic president eager to regulate their industry and to elect conservative candidates. They wanted to drive the moderates out of their party, and their money made sure that happened.

I’m not talking about the Kochs.

Story Continued Below

David Koch’s death last week set off a new round of chatter about his and his brother’s impact on U.S. politics. It’s true they’ve had a big impact: Over the past four decades, David and Charles funneled profits from the family’s petroleum company, started by their father, into the Tea-Party Republican right. They might have soured on the populist and protectionist tendencies of Donald Trump’s Republican brand, but their imprint on the GOP remains indelible.

The Kochs, however, are just the latest in a long line of oil-rich brothers driving the Republican Party’s rightward march. The very firstwere the Pews, who, between the 1930s and 1960s, spent their oil fortune remaking the GOP in their libertarian and conservative Christian image.

Today, we associate the Pew name with moderate bipartisan organizations like the Pew Charitable Trust and Pew Research Center. But decades ago, J. Howard Pew and his brother Joseph N. Pew, Jr., made sure it stood for staunchly conservative principles and an unbending right-wing Republicanism. From the rise of the religious right to the death of the moderate Republican, it’s the Pews whose fingerprints are all over the modern GOP.

The Pews’ political ambition was driven by two bitter hatreds: Of Franklin D. Roosevelt and of the Rockefeller family.

The Rockefellers piqued the Pews’ rage from the very beginning. Their father, Joseph Newton Pew, struggled during the late 19th century to keep his company, Sun Oil (Sunoco), afloat in the corporate seas ruled by John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. Paralyzed by the predatory ways of the Standard monopoly (Standard controlled 90 percent of U.S. oil refining by 1890), the senior Pew prayed that his company would survive long enough to get reestablished in a new field, beyond the Rockefeller controlled oil patch of western Pennsylvania. Pew’s prayers were answered partly with the opening of the Lima pool in Ohio in the 1890s, and wholly with the 1901 Spindletop discovery in Southeast Texas. At first word of the Texas strike Pew set up drilling operations in Beaumont, the sleepy town near the gushing crude that became the bustling epicenter of the world’s new megafield. Sun Oil was now a player in the industry. Sun’s ascent mirrored that of a host of independent oil companies whose fortunes thereafter would be tied to “Texas Tea.” Defined by their limited integrated capacities of production, refining and transportation, these independents also embraced the label for what it said about their wish to work outside (and against) the juggernaut of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and the sector of “major” oil. By the mid-20th century, major oil would consist of seven integrated, multi-national firms, three of which were offshoots of the original Standard: Standard California (Chevron), Standard New Jersey (Exxon/Esso), and Standard New York (Mobil). Squashed by Standard in Pennsylvania, independent oilmen’s relocation west spawned a new reality for them and their industry. There, amid a “Gusher Age” (1900s-1940s) in the oil patches of the Southwest, they gained the ability to compete with the majors.

Their new corporate clout drew them into a fight with another foe: Franklin D. Roosevelt. Observing Roosevelt’s efforts to install an expansive New Deal for industry in hopes of restoring the nation’s economic health during the Great Depression, J. Howard Pew, who became Sun’s president in 1912, and Joseph N. Pew, Jr., who assumed its vice presidency that same year, grew enraged at what they considered a dictatorial attempt by Washington to squash the libertarian principles on which their company—and, they believed, their country—were built. But it was the New Deal’s encroachment on their corporate sector that truly animated them. Led by Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes, the Roosevelt administration imposed regulations on an industry turned frantic by the gushing crude of East Texas, including price-fixing measures and costly conservation controls—measures that hurt small producers far more than the majors. Angered by Ickes, a man they reviled as friendly to big governmentandbig oil, the Pews responded.

They did so with dead seriousness. Of Howard a U.S. senator quipped that the “stiff-necked, bushy-browed, six-footer” had the constitution of “an affidavit.” That constitution was on full display as the brothers turned into warring politicos in the 1930s, eagerly becoming the vanguards of the independents’ anti-statist revolt. Their company’s foothold in Texas and popularity among its citizens (the Pews were “square dealers,” locals chimed, contrasting them with Standard and Washington men) secured them that right to lead.Howard lectured widely to rally his peers. His most popular sermon was “The Oil Industry: A Living Monument to the American System of Free Enterprise,” which praised oilmen’s free-market heritage and painted their wars with New Dealers as a life struggle for America’s soul. “The persistent effort to bring industry, business, commerce and enterprise under government domination is a flat denial of all the lessons of the century and a half of the industrial age,” he inveighed. Pew told oilers they had a huge “part to play” in the takedown of tyranny.

The Pews also poured money into media with intent to turn their lobbying into a popular movement. They bought newspapers, sponsored theThree Star Extraradio program on the NBC network, extended their leadershipin business associations, and through these and other channels transmitted anti-Roosevelt doctrine into the average American home. In their quest to spread animus against the New Deal there were few more determined or well-to-do crusaders than the Pews, and while they would realize few immediate political payoffs, their efforts would help set the stage—and provide the institutional structure—for the GOP’s reconstitution in the post-World War II period. At the time, though, the Pews were dogged in their grassroots action because national party politics did not yet provide space for them. To be sure, they tried to carve such space out. Joseph became active inside the Republican Party and served as a delegate to the Republican National Convention. From 1934 to 1940 he gave over $2 million to the party, representing one portion of Pew family donations to the GOPover the same time period. But the Pews could coax little return. In 1940, wanting a no-nonsense conservative like Ohio Senator Robert Taft to take the reins of the party as the presidential nominee, they were stuck instead with Wendell Willkie, a Democrat-turned-Republican centrist who spurned them. “I don’t know Joe Pew,” Willkie avowed publicly, “but I am 100 percent against his policy of turning the Republican Party back to the days of Harding and Coolidge,” referring to two presidents who had nurturedTaft’s brand of pro-business, anti-progressive politics in the 1920s. On another occasion Willkie even scorned Pew’s kind: “The good Lord put all this oil in the ground, then someone comes along who hasn’t been a success at doing anything else, and takes it out of the ground. The minute he does that, he considers himself an expert on everything from politics to petticoats.” Willkie mocked their power, and independent oil men promised never again to let a politician get away with that sin.

Their pledge to respond to Willkie in kind and roll back liberal forces both in the party and outside of it gained traction in the 1940s.Flourishing businesses during the war helped. Washington, ironically, was kind to the Pews. Thanks to lucrative federal contracts for Sun Oil’s fuel (the company would blend over a billion gallons of aviation fuel for the armed forces, outpacing even its main competitor, Standard New Jersey), annual income rose accordingly, from $131.5 million in 1939 to $600.8 million in 1944.With their coffers full of federal dollars, the Pews could expand their influence in other ways, with Howard in the lead. In 1947, after 35 years of bullish leadership, during which his company grew 40 times over, Howard resigned as Sun’s president; Joseph did so the same day. As chairman of the Board, Howard would continue to oversee corporate expansion, but going forward he would focus on fighting progressivism in politics, philanthropy, and church pulpits and pews.

That meant engaging an old enemy—the Rockefellers—on a new plane. By the late 1940s, Howard was not only bitter about major oil’s global expansion at the cost of U.S. domestic production (and with Washington’s privileging of that trend), but also about how the Rockefellers were reshaping society with their mammoth charity. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and his sons were, by now, heading a multifaceted foundation that sought to provide humanitarianism and economic development on an international scale. In Pew’s mind, it was the Rockefellers’ brand of ecumenical, interdenominational and internationalist(“monopolistic”) Protestantism, and its prioritizing of science and structural reform over personal matters of the soul that was responsible for the nation’s secular slide. Determined to offset the Rockefellers’ modernistic gospel, in 1948 Pew helped his siblings incorporate the Pew Memorial Trust to “help meet human needs” through support of “education, social services, religion, health care and medical research,”then christened his own, the J. Howard Pew Freedom Trust, whose charge was even bolder: “to acquaint the American people with the values of a free market, the dangers of inflation, the paralyzing effects of government controls on the lives and activities of people” and “promote the recognition of the interdependence of Christianity and freedom.”

Pew held nothing back when bankrolling allies who would help defend Christian libertarianism. During the 1950s he sent huge checks to agencies that shared his laissez-faire faith. Besides giving generously to Spiritual Mobilization, a Los Angeles–based libertarian lobby, and the Christian Freedom Foundation (CFF), based in New York, Pew reached out to same-thinking Catholics. Familiar, no doubt, with William F. Buckley, Sr.—a Texas Catholic who, his family fondly recalled, was “above all, an independent oilman in a world of oil Titans, whom he held in no awe”—Pew eagerly funded William F. Buckley, Jr.’s new conservatism. When, in 1955, the junior Buckley released the inaugural issue ofNational Review,its back cover carried several endorsements, none more glowing than Pew’s. Pew also gave generously to Catholic conservative schools and causes that his ally in the business Ignatius O’Shaughnessy, Fred Koch’s onetime partner, generously supported.

Pew channeled most of his funds to evangelical Protestant entities. Unlike Fred Koch,who, at the time, was also starting to steer his corporate profits and political energies toward anti-communist and anti-statist causes, Pew underscored the “Christian” in his libertarian ideology. That propensity grew out of his family’s ties to the Free Presbyterian Church, which broke from Old School and New School Presbyterian Churches in the 1840s over slavery. Anti-slavery to the core (their farm served as a way station on the Underground Railroad), the Pews rigorously protected personal liberty in theological terms. Howard continued that tradition in the Cold War years. While serving as chair of the National Lay Committee in the National Council of Churches (NCC), he agitated against the “collectivist” drift in Presbyterianism and America’s Protestant mainline.

He found another way to push back by funding pastors, seminaries and lobbies associated with “new evangelicalism,” the loosely coordinated movement that would lay the groundwork for the religious right. In one respect, new evangelicals sought simply to continue a fight against liberal “modernist” trends in American Protestantism and society that self-identified “fundamentalists” had waged in the previous half century. Thanks to the unmatched financial support of independent oilmen Lyman and Milton Stewart, the brother tandem at the helm of Union Oil Company of California (whose own hatred of the Rockefellers knew no bounds), fundamentalists hadproved highly successful at constructing an alternative infrastructure of churches, missionary agencies and schools that resisted progressivism’s pull. Yet new evangelicals, unlike fundamentalists, wanted to engage rather than recoil from mainstream society—they sought to redeem it rather than run from it. The number of institutions within the new evangelical orb that would benefit from Pew’s millions would be spectacularly large, including illustrious representatives such asChristianity Today, the National Association of Evangelicals and evangelist Billy Graham. Graham and his friends were known to lean on the “big boys” of southwestern oil for financing, among them the super-rich Sid Richardson and Hugh Roy Cullen. But J. Howard Pew was the biggest backer among them.

By the late 1950s, the phalanx of political action that Howard and his brother had constructed started to send notice to the Willkies of Republicanism that they were operating on borrowed time. The Pews and their peers in independent oil had by then given up on Dwight Eisenhower, a president they actively backed in 1952. Not only did he seem unwilling to protect their interests (his hesitancy to impose quotas on foreign oil was one point of contention), but he also refused to tack their ideological line from the center to the right. As a result, Howard bemoaned privately, “We are suffering today from a one-party system. … If you can find any difference between the Democratic Platform and the Republican Platform, you have a more discerning eye than I have.”

As the GOP primaries of 1964 approached, the Pews identified an antidote: Barry Goldwater. Although they rebutted claims of membership in the John Birch Society, which Fred Koch helped found, the Pews were just as anxious as Birchers to back the cowboy politician. Before his death in 1963, Joseph Pew would pour countless funds into Goldwater’s emerging campaign, while Howard would prove to be just as “overly generous” (as a Goldwater adviser would gush in a note of thanks) in his support of the candidate. Goldwater’s vanquishing of Nelson Rockefeller in the 1964 GOP primaries gave Howard (as it would have given Joseph, had he lived just long enough to see it) exceeding pleasure, even if his defeat at the hands of Lyndon Johnson in the general election proved that the conservative revolution had a ways to go.

The fact that Rockefeller Republicanism would meet its demise in subsequent years pleased Howard even more. Besides conjuring up bad memories of Sun Oil’s early struggles in the face of the Standard monopoly, the Rockefeller name represented a trend toward concentrated power and ideological compromise that Pew abhorred. As the 1968 election season unfolded he answered calls from conservative strategists to help Richard Nixon get elected. Nelson Rockefeller’s pondering of another run for the GOP nomination gave Pew extra incentive. “I do know much about Nelson Rockefeller,” he wrote an ally, and “he would be the worst man that I can think of for President of this Country of ours. To put a Republican in as President like Nelson Rockefeller, who supports all of the evils that have brought this Country to its knees, would be the most tragic thing that could happen to our Country.” Pew vented some more. “If we must continue these evil Democratic principles, let the Democrats destroy us. I have always voted the Republican Ticket, but if Rockefeller is our candidate, I shall either vote the Democratic Ticket or go fishing.” Rockefeller failed, again, and Pew could rest easy.

Now retired from Sun Oil’s Board, Pew’s involvement in the networks he funded intensified. Shortly after Nixon defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey, he joined movement conservatives at Nixon’s prayer breakfast in Washington to offer supplications on behalf of the new “silent majority.” Then, as a capstone of sorts for his philanthropic career, on July 4, 1970, he and Billy Graham oversaw “Honor America Day,” which brought 350,000 people to the Washington Mall in a show of Christian patriotism and traditional values. In no small way the celebration was a launch of the culture-war politicking of the 1970s. A year later, on November 27, 1971, Pew died at his home on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Graham offered a benediction at his funeral. That was only fitting. Pew had had nailed to his Sun office walls two portraits “of his most admired Americans”: one was of Herbert Hoover, the other of Billy Graham.

By the time of Howard’s death, the Pews’ renown as God’s bankrollers was being passed on to other independent oilmen, none more illustrious than the Hunt brothers of Dallas. Their petrofunds would pour into an ever-broadening and politicized evangelicalism that would spawn the religious right of the late 1970s and fuel its rise in Republican ranks during the 1980s. They would also ensure that the Pews’ fierce passions for God, liberty and black gold would continue to shape the religious impulses of an aroused American society. When the Koch brothers stepped to the fore in the early 2000s to back a Tea-Party Republicanism that called for patriotic marches on Washington and beseeched politicians to protect traditional family and fiscal values and (in Sarah Palin’s words) let oilers of the West “drill, baby, drill,” they tapped a sentiment running deep in American history—one that the Pews had taken advantage of decades before.

#Brought #Foreign #modern #Politics

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teiraymondmccoy78 · 6 years ago

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Blockchain’s weakest links | Chicago Booth Review

Blockchain” has become a business buzzword. Commentators, thought leaders, and business experts are highlighting how the distributed-ledger technology promises to revolutionize business and logistics. Universities are teaching courses in blockchain. Blockchain jobs are “booming in Asia,” reports CNBC. Blockchain “lets us imagine a world that’s not dominated by Google, Facebook, or, for that matter, the [US National Security Agency], one where we, the people, the core components of global society, get to say how our data is managed,” reads The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything. It’s a lot of attention for what is essentially an accounting technology. The plumbing behind financial services is generally unaccustomed to such publicity.

Blockchain rose to public prominence as the technology underpinning Bitcoin, but it could end up having more lasting value than the cryptocurrency. To some, the first era of the internet was about exchanging information, and the second era, which we are now entering, is about exchanging value. Blockchains could use computer science to create “smart contracts” through which business can be conducted online more safely, securely, and reliably.

Billions of dollars are already riding on this future. Companies are expected to spend $2.1 billion on blockchains by 2018, and $9.2 billion by 2021, according to research firm IDC. But first, like any new technology or market—and blockchain is both, in some sense—it has to overcome a few issues to prove its staying power.

For starters, there are different types of blockchains, and researchers have identified some potentially severe challenges facing the most ubiquitous type, known as “proof-of-work.” The choices companies and others make in the near future about which system to use, and how to use it, will determine how blockchain systems progress—and if blockchain does indeed mark a next era of tech.

Weak link #1: The reliability of ‘private’ blockchains

The term “blockchain” lacks a common definition. Many confuse blockchain—a decentralized, distributed-ledger technology—with cryptocurrencies or other accounting systems. But Bitcoin is one of some 1,600 digital currencies and tokens. It runs on a blockchain system, and users receive bitcoins as rewards for doing work on the system. This is the most mature application of blockchain, and the one with which many companies and investors are most familiar.

Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonym for the anonymous author or authors of the 2008 white paper that first described Bitcoin and this first iteration of blockchain, wrote about “blocks” of transactions, each appended in sequence to a never-ending “blockchain.” If two people or companies did business, their agreement would be recorded, grouped into a block, and verified by anonymous “miners.” When verified, a block would attach immutably to the previous block, lengthening the chain. The miners, as a reward for verifying the transaction, would receive tokens, or “bitcoins.”

What made this method revolutionary is that it decentralized trust. For millennia, business transactions have required trust between the parties involved. For two people to complete a transaction, the seller had to trust the buyer, and vice versa. Both parties had to trust that money and goods would be transferred as promised. Clubs, exchanges, and myriad networks have been created to essentially vet and verify that the people doing business are trustworthy and, if they act inappropriately, will be held accountable.

This had been hard to replicate in a global, digital world, where computers meet instead of people and don’t always know, much less trust, each other. In Nakamoto’s blockchain transactions, however, users put their trust in anonymous miners—and in the proof-of-work system itself. In it, sophisticated cryptography generates difficult math problems that miners’ computers race to solve. When one miner’s computer successfully solves a problem, the answer, verified by the slower miners, serves as validation that a block with accurate information is being added to the chain.

The system is decentralized and produces a distributed ledger: a copy of the verified chain sits on every computer on the network, which is different from a typical centralized record-keeping system. Because everyone keeps a copy of the ledger, no one has to place trust in a third party; all information in question has been verified and stored in blocks on the chain.

Riding Bitcoin’s wave Hundreds of thousands of transactions are confirmed daily on Bitcoin’s famous blockchain.

But not all systems being called blockchains work the way Nakamoto described, and not all are decentralized. When some companies talk about integrating blockchain into their operations, they’re describing something with a central authority—a database that does not involve mining or maintaining trust between anonymous parties, says Chicago Booth’s Eric Budish. On this type of blockchain, transactions are recorded and a database is maintained by a central authority, such as a computer or person at the company. A copy of the verified chain sits on every computer on the network, making the system distributed but not decentralized.

Some researchers call these “private” blockchains, and Budish questions whether they should be called blockchains at all, rather than simply better databases. “A lot of the excitement about blockchain is [actually] excitement about better data-management processes,” he says.

The business applications of this technology could still improve how companies interact and run their operations, and represent better record keeping. But centralized databases may not be as safe, as each has a single point at which its system could potentially fail. One of the cornerstone precepts of blockchains is that they operate at the highest levels of security, but that’s not true of private blockchains, says Imperial College PhD candidate Engin Iyidogan, one of dozens of researchers who have been studying blockchains from every angle.

Moreover, if private blockchains fail, it could tarnish all blockchains by diminishing people’s faith in them—although it could also spur innovation. “If people realize that private blockchains are not disruptive or efficiently implementable, the hype over blockchain technology vanishes and we focus more on applications of true decentralized systems,” Iyidogan says.

Weak link #2: Transaction fees

Private blockchains aside, much of—if not most—economics research taking place looks at Nakamoto’s proof-of-work system, which many economists treat as the default blockchain design. One celebrated advantage of the proof-of-work blockchain: it can make markets more efficient by helping transactions to settle more quickly, eliminating the time between when parties agree and when the deal closes, and by extension the costs. “Most people agree the potential for blockchain is very high as a mechanism for streamlining the transaction costs of settlement,” Cornell’s Maureen O’Hara says.

If deals were to close more quickly, the money tied up in a pending transaction could be put to better use. In the leveraged-loan market, for instance, where companies borrow cash at steep rates, it reportedly takes 27 days to settle a transaction, compared to just two or three days for a stock trade, and agents spend a quarter of their overhead expenses on answering investors’ calls to confirm the details of loans. Distributed-ledger settlement would obviate these problems, experts say.

But it won’t be easy for the Nakamoto blockchain to evolve into a mostly seamless market like the major stock exchanges. Some research suggests the transaction fees involved will be an impediment that prevents blockchain from growing.

Transaction fees are an increasingly important component of these blockchain systems, and they are closely related to transaction times. Today, if you want to make a transaction, you offer miners a fee to include your transaction in a block. The fee you offer depends on how quickly you need that transaction processed; if you want your transaction prioritized, you pay a higher fee. In addition to the miners’ fee, you may pay a fee to a bitcoin exchange to process the transaction and, if wanted, to transfer bitcoin back into dollars or another noncryptocurrency.

Transaction fees can be volatile Miners on the Bitcoin blockchain enjoyed a surge in transaction fees earned during the recent run-up in Bitcoin’s market value.

However, only 21 million bitcoins can be mined under Nakamoto’s design, and about 17 million are already in existence, according to blockchain.com. When the final bitcoin is created, the market will switch to a purely transaction-fee-based system. At this point, these fees will be the only way to attract miners to a block. The higher the fees offered, the more mining power will be directed to the blockchain.

Transaction fees help the market reach equilibrium by allowing miners to earn more for processing some blocks faster—while helping more time-crucial transactions to be processed more quickly than others. But O’Hara, Cornell’s David Easley, and Cornell PhD candidate Soumya Basu find that transaction fees are an impediment to bitcoin holders who want to use the cryptocurrency as a medium of exchange to pay for real-world things, rather than to hold as a speculative investment. “As users battle to get transactions posted on the blockchain, transaction fees are rising to levels that discourage bitcoin usage, highlighting an important structural issue confronting the blockchain,” O’Hara, Easley, and Basu write.

According to the researchers’ economic model, transaction fees make mining profitable over time—but these fees won’t speed up transaction times enough to counteract the number of users who get fed up with waiting and leave the system. “The fees directly induce some users to drop out, while increasing wait times cause other fee-paying users to depart as well,” they write. The researchers identify the problem, but they don’t propose any remedies for it.

Moreover, according to another group, once all bitcoins are mined, transaction fees may not raise enough money to support the system’s infrastructure. In a comparison of bitcoin’s payment mechanisms and those of a traditional company, Columbia’s Gur Huberman and Ciamac C. Moallemi and Chicago Booth’s Jacob Leshno find that the transaction delays and high fees that plague blockchain-based settlement are an inherent part of the proof-of-work system.

Nakamoto’s system has some congestion baked in. It makes people wait for transactions to be compiled into blocks, and then wait again for the grouped transactions to be verified. And it will eventually make some people wait longer than others, if they’re unwilling to pay higher fees for faster service. “Congestion is not merely an engineering necessity, but also a device to motivate users to pay transaction fees,” they write.

In the Bitcoin system, no single party sets transaction fees. Instead, they are the result of supply and demand. The transaction fees-for-service operate in a nonlinear fashion. When blocks of transactions are less than half of their maximum size, users pay low transaction fees, as there is less competition for miners’ attention. At 80 percent of maximum block size, the fees shoot up as the block approaches its top size.

A blockchain can work well when there’s relatively low congestion, and charges fees that are relatively low but sufficient to keep the system functioning smoothly and efficiently, says Leshno. What complicates matters is that rising transaction fees affect the market’s demand but not supply: higher prices may deter some users from sending transactions for processing, but they will not change the fact that the system can process only one block of transactions every 10 minutes, regardless of the number of miners who compete to add the block to the chain.

And there’s no limit to how low or high the fees can go. When a company such as PayPal processes transactions, it charges what consumers are willing to pay, not what it costs to process the transaction. In the case of a bitcoin-based blockchain, says Leshno, paying market rather than monopoly prices for transaction services may be efficient, but those market prices might not serve the system well. There’s no guarantee fees won’t be so low that miners have no incentive to mine, or, more likely, be so high that transactions become unaffordable. Thus, while blockchain-based payment solves many problems, it isn’t necessarily cheaper than regular payments, the study finds.

“The costs of operating the [blockchain payment system] are likely to be higher than those of a traditional firm: its decentralized architecture requires duplication of computations and expenditure of efforts in the random selection tournament; the aggregate mining level can be too high; costly delays are necessary to induce users to pay transaction fees,” the researchers write.

Weak link #3: Energy use

Because bitcoin mining is a proof-of-work system, miners use electricity to run computers as they race to solve math problems to earn the right to validate the next block in a blockchain, and thereby win a bitcoin reward. This has raised another big concern with Nakamoto’s system: energy use.

As Bitcoin prices surged, so did mining and its impact on the power grid. If Bitcoin were a country, it would rank 39th in worldwide energy usage, behind the Philippines (38th) and ahead of Austria (40th), according to Digiconomist’s Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index. Yet it facilitates fewer transactions annually than the Visa credit-card network does each day, according to Australian National University’s June Ma and Rabee Tourky and University of Toronto’s Joshua S. Gans.

Nakamoto’s design leads directly to this intense resource consumption, the researchers find, because miners have to play a game every time they mine a block, and making the game’s math equations harder doesn’t tamp down energy usage. While buying more expensive computer chips to perform the equations could in theory discourage some miners from participating, this hasn’t happened, according to the researchers.

Miners’ swelling electricity usage Even by conservative calculations, Bitcoin miners’ demand on the power grid has at least quadrupled since 2017.

In a theory paper, Ma, Gans, and Tourky argue that the Nakamoto system allows anybody to mine—granting free entry to whomever has the software to compete. If the system instead were to limit the number of miners, this would do more to reduce the amount of computing power, and electricity, that miners expend. Granted, that would require Nakamoto, if still alive, to make changes to the system.

Another trio of researchers—Chicago Booth’s Lin William Cong and Zhiguo He and George Mason’s Jiasun Li—say that Nakamoto’s system creates a wasteful energy arms race. Miners, to stay competitive, invest in computing capabilities by spending heavily on networks, as well as electricity and cooling. The investment may improve a miner’s chances of winning a computational competition. However, Nakamoto’s system is a zero-sum game, so if investment benefits one miner, it directly hurts the chances of other miners.

But regardless of who wins a competition, or how many miners compete, or how much energy they use, one block will be added to the chain every 10 minutes, on average. The effort that goes in may grow ever larger, but the outcome remains the same. So the intense competition produces no benefit for the system or end users. “The arms race nature of this technology is what’s underlying the electricity usage,” says He. He and his coresearchers point out that risk-sharing considerations lead miners to work together in the form of large mining “pools.” The rise of mining pools is a financial innovation that improves miners’ risk sharing; but it enables miners in a pool to devote greater computation power, aggravating the arms race that consumes a tremendous amount of energy. (For more, see “Are blockchain mining pools problematic?” page 31.) Excessive competition, say the researchers, is an inherent part and problem of Nakamoto’s design.

But again, not all blockchains resemble Nakamoto’s original vision. Some competing cryptocurrencies are based on proof-of-stake, which validates transactions differently. The proof-of-stake system doesn’t involve races to solve mathematical puzzles, and thus there is no reward for doing so. Instead, the amount of cryptocurrency a miner holds serves as a validation of trustworthiness and functions something like a bond: a miner has to hold a certain amount of cryptocurrency before being allowed to verify and add blocks to the chain. Miners with more cryptocurrency have more mining power, and they make money simply through transaction fees. This system is still a public blockchain, not a private one, because it has a distributed ledger and no central authority. But because it doesn’t require many computers to run the same equations as they race to solve a puzzle, proof-of-stake uses less electricity.

Ethereum is reportedly switching to a proof-of-stake system, in part to mitigate the environmental costs of proof-of-work’s massive electricity bills.

McGill’s Fahad Saleh argues that such blockchains using proof-of-stake can be economically viable because this system can achieve consensus: miners agree that a block is valid and allow the blockchain to continue. It’s important, however, that proof-of-stake systems incorporate rules that require users to have a sufficient stake of cryptocurrency to participate in validation, he writes. Otherwise, users could get in the way of consensus to drive up their own rewards.

“My conclusions emphasize the need for developers to heed economic guidance when designing consensus protocols,” Saleh writes. If participants own a lot of the cryptocurrency being used to run the blockchain, they have an incentive to not tank the currency’s value.

Weak link #4: The cost of security

Sabotage is another looming issue, according to Booth’s Budish. He took a theoretical look at the economics and security of Nakamoto’s blockchain, focusing on the large relative cost required to make blockchain secure. In a series of equations, Budish lays out his concerns.

He started by asking how much computational power miners are buying for tournaments. The answer, he says, is that it depends on how much miners are compensated. The more miners can make, the more they will mine.

But for miners to stay honest, they have to know that they will make more money by mining than by sabotaging the system, Budish notes. The amount miners receive over time as they help to run and maintain the blockchain is known as a “flow,” while the one-time haul from an attack is known as a “stock.” “The recurring ‘flow’ payments to miners for running the blockchain must be large relative to the one-off ‘stock’ benefits of attacking it,” Budish writes.

And to keep a blockchain secure, miners have to be convinced regularly—every 10 minutes, essentially, which is how often miners compete—to stay honest. If Bitcoin were to become a store of value and transactions were to grow, the temptation to sabotage the system would also grow, he points out. Users trying to maintain security would have to offer miners an increasingly large amount almost 150 times a day.

Moreover, miners currently use expensive, specialized chips to participate in tournaments. But if the price of those were to fall, or if miners were able to rent chips rather than buy them, the cost of attacking would fall. It would then become more tempting for miners to sabotage the blockchain, steal bitcoins, and drive down values. These problems will get worse if the “Bitcoin blockchain gets economically important enough to tempt a saboteur,” Budish writes.

Small-scale transfers made up the earliest bitcoin transactions—think black-market transactions, purchases by computer hobbyists, and intrafamily international transfers such as sending money to a child studying abroad. But as the value of Bitcoin grows, the system runs into trouble, according to Budish’s model, and he is skeptical it can really scale up.

The issues Budish described have already been realized. In mid-May, a market participant with sufficient computing power was able to take control of the underlying ledger of the Bitcoin Gold market. Soon news site CoinDesk reported that at least four other cryptocurrencies had also been hit.

Weak link #5: Regulation

While computer science has created a decentralized system of trust, regulation could offer peace of mind to wary market participants. But Nakamoto’s original description of blockchain didn’t mention regulation, and regulators have been slow to catch up with cryptocurrency trading and blockchain adoption, Cornell’s O’Hara says.

The regulatory outlook for all blockchain systems and cryptocurrencies is highly uncertain. A half dozen regulators in the United States, as well as their counterparts overseas, have issued a series of often contradictory announcements and enforcement actions that touch blockchain companies issuing tokens or operating a cryptocurrency exchange. The regulators don’t agree on whether cryptocurrencies should be legally considered commodities, currencies, or securities, which affects what rules cryptocurrency holders and issuers need to follow.

Take initial coin offerings, or ICOs, a form of financing (or is it securities issuance?) that involves a company selling digital tokens that can be used to buy and sell things on a blockchain it is setting up. The company is often a start-up, but is sometimes an established corporation such as Kodak, which has announced it will use a blockchain to protect digital rights for images. While regulators at the US Securities and Exchange Commission have said ICOs are flouting regulations that apply to companies that issue shares, blockchain enthusiasts have snapped up the new tokens.

Academics are clearly thinking about the regulatory implications of blockchain. More than 120 academic papers have been written on the subject in the past three years. And businesses have been just as prolific: analyzing 1,000 white papers describing companies’ ICO plans, University of Luxembourg’s Dirk A. Zetzsche and Linus Föhr, University of New South Wales’s Ross Buckley, and University of Hong Kong’s Douglas W. Arner found a vast gulf in disclosure levels between them and traditional securities documents.

“Many ICOs are offered on the basis of utterly inadequate disclosure of information; more than half the ICO white papers are either silent on the initiators or backers or do not provide contact details, and an even greater share do not elaborate on the applicable law, segregation or pooling of client funds, and the existence of an external auditor,” they write.

Because existing regulations don’t address many of the issues, the researchers recommend that governments require more disclosures and lean on intermediaries, such as the exchanges where the tokens trade, to help enforce these standards.

Cong and He also say regulators need to pay attention to the possibility of collusion in some blockchains. In a study, they look at permissioned blockchains—not private, but in which parties need permission to participate. This type of blockchain is popular in industry, for example to enable a retailer such as Wal-Mart to conduct business more easily, quickly, and safely..

http://bit.ly/2Rf52vj

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vanessawestwcrtr5 · 6 years ago

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Blockchain’s weakest links | Chicago Booth Review

Weak link #1: The reliability of ‘private’ blockchains

Riding Bitcoin’s wave Hundreds of thousands of transactions are confirmed daily on Bitcoin’s famous blockchain.

Weak link #2: Transaction fees

Transaction fees can be volatile Miners on the Bitcoin blockchain enjoyed a surge in transaction fees earned during the recent run-up in Bitcoin’s market value.

Weak link #3: Energy use

Miners’ swelling electricity usage Even by conservative calculations, Bitcoin miners’ demand on the power grid has at least quadrupled since 2017.

Ethereum is reportedly switching to a proof-of-stake system, in part to mitigate the environmental costs of proof-of-work’s massive electricity bills.

Weak link #4: The cost of security

Weak link #5: Regulation

http://bit.ly/2Rf52vj

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courtneyvbrooks87 · 6 years ago

Text

Blockchain’s weakest links | Chicago Booth Review

Weak link #1: The reliability of ‘private’ blockchains

Riding Bitcoin’s wave Hundreds of thousands of transactions are confirmed daily on Bitcoin’s famous blockchain.

Weak link #2: Transaction fees

Transaction fees can be volatile Miners on the Bitcoin blockchain enjoyed a surge in transaction fees earned during the recent run-up in Bitcoin’s market value.

Weak link #3: Energy use

Miners’ swelling electricity usage Even by conservative calculations, Bitcoin miners’ demand on the power grid has at least quadrupled since 2017.

Ethereum is reportedly switching to a proof-of-stake system, in part to mitigate the environmental costs of proof-of-work’s massive electricity bills.

Weak link #4: The cost of security

Weak link #5: Regulation

http://bit.ly/2Rf52vj

#IFTTT #Cryptocurrency and Bitcoin

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erinobjectsandidentity-blog · 6 years ago

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Further Reading - A Life Less Throwaway: The Lost Art of Buying for Life by Tara Button

As part of my further reading, I have read ‘A Life Less Throwaway: The Lost Art of Buying for Life’ by Tara Button, the founder and CEO of ‘Buy Me Once’ - an online shops and directory for quality, long-lasting and sustainable products. The book explores consumerism and materialism in modern society; Button examines advertising, marketing and other variables that foster over-consumption and ideologies of materialism. The book, instead, pioneers for mindful consumption. Proposing we seriously evaluate our purchases and prioritize longevity, quality and sustainability when regarding our products. Ultimately the book urges us to reinvent the way in which we consume.

The book thoroughly investigates advertising and marketing’s role in our consumption. Having worked in the advertising industry, Button is aware of all the manipulations companies employ to ensure sales, and by extension, profits. Button analyses how advertising/marketing creates, and thrives, off a culture that makes us feel inadequate or lacking. ‘We’re being manipulated to feel that our current possessions (and by extension ourselves) are inadequate’ (Button, 2018, xii). By making us feel insufficient and/or incomplete, they are compelling us to buy. We buy to fill a void, to make us feel complete. It all comes down to the ideology that material things will make us happy and/or worthy. As social creatures, we crave social acceptance, however modern society has placed too much value on the approval and opinion of others. This need for validation cultivates materialism - ‘The messages we see in ads and social media channels perpetuates a myth that having things or looking a certain way makes us worthy of love and admiration...we start to focus on our looks and achievements and buy high-status items that others will admire. However, any admiration or connection we gain is on a shallow level, and because it isn’t based on anything authentic, it leaves us feeling disconnected and unsatisfied’ (Button, 2018, p.7). Essentially this is just a tool used by brands and companies to lure us into buying. We need to realize our value does not lie, nor is it synonymous with, our stuff.

There are many tactics used within the advertising and marketing industry. One discussed heavily by Button is planned obsolescence – the deliberate act of making products to break. The quality of products has drastically reduced over the years; materials are cheaply sourced in order to maximize profits, products are mass produced as quickly as possible to maximize sales and advertising and branding is at the forefront of the business model to encourage use to buy products. ‘Our whole houses, our whole lives, have become stuffed full of things that let us down, cause our stress levels to skyrocket and our bank accounts to empty. But precisely because these things are poorly made or faddy, perversely we are compelled to buy more’ (Button, 2018, ix). Planned obsolescence is again a ploy used to get us to buy more. We regularly need to replace broken items, and this quick turnaround increases profits. ‘The commercial world does everything it can to tempt us away from longevity, but that only serves its ever-hungry self, not us, the people who have to deal with the broken zips, rattling washing machines and rips in the crotches of our jeans’ (Button, 2018, p.4). This is something, sadly, we have come to accept as nowadays we prioritize convivence and price. Whilst initially we are thrilled at the idea of cheap items, this model actually encourages us to spend more over time and leaves us dissatisfied with, quite frankly, shoddy products.

Then there is psychological obsolescence. ‘Psychological obsolescence is a technique used by companies to persuade us to replace the products we own, even if they still work perfectly well. Over the last few decades companies have conditioned us to see things as temporary and throwaway. They keep us obsessed with the new.’ (Button, 2018, p.27). We constantly upgrade our possessions for the newer and/or trendier. Much of the time, this is linked to appearance and social approval. New products often come with high status; they are an indicator of style and wealth. We have come to view material things as disposable. This is, however, an unsustainable and wasteful way of consumption. ‘Mindless consumerism is pushing our poor planet to crisis point’ (Button, 2018. p.6), this way of consuming is having a disastrous and irreversible environmental impact. This volume of industrial mass production is severely polluting. One way to tackle climate change and pollution is to change the way in which we consume. We must stop over-consuming and overindulging material things. ‘The way we things is broken and the things we buy are breaking. But we can break this cycle. If we buy things we love and buy things that last, and then take care of them, we might just save the world’ (Button, 2018, p.236).

Button also explores the extent of advertising in modern society. Advertising is more prominent in society than ever before - ’we now see and hear an estimated 362 ads a day and over 5,000 brand exposures’ (Button, 2018, p.44). With the growth of digital technologies and social media, it is easy to advertise than ever before. It has even paved way for entirely new forms of advertising, such as social media influencers. These forms are subtle and often work subconsciously. We often don’t realize we are being sold to through social media platforms – what with personalized ads, undisclosed ads and haul videos. ‘Scrolling through idealized pictures of other people's lives increases our anxiety and doesn’t help us feel grateful for what we have’ (Button, 2018, p. 63) instead they function, again, to make us feel inadequate and incomplete, and ultimately buy.

Button also explores identity in relation to our possessions. Much of my further reading thus far has been dismissive of identity in terms of materials objects. A common opinion amongst minimalism and mindful consumers is that buying things akin to your identity is trivial and unimportant, as, ultimately, your things do not reflect or retain you. Whilst this is true to an extent, your material possessions do not define you, it must be said that buying things that are true to your sense of self is integral to mindful consumption. When evaluating our consumption, should we not consider personal style, values and character, as well as function? Would this not ensure our love for our objects and our care for them as such? When discussing mindful consumption, Button says ‘this meant that the possessions I ‘curated’ automatically started to reflect the deeper and more stable elements of my character, values and personal style’ (Button, 2018, p.4). Essentially, mindful consumption led her to make purchase based on her own identity and needs, rather than advertisements, trends or social status.

Overall, Button makes a compelling, informed and analytical investigation into the world of consumerism. She discusses all elements of our consumption with depth and consideration. I have found ‘A Life Less Throwaway’ to be the one of the most educational pieces of further reading in this project thus far. She perfectly captures and explains the exploitative and manipulative tactics adopted by brands to secure sales. She explores everything that is wrong with modern day consumption and the steps we can take towards a more mindful, ethical and sustainable way of consuming. ‘A life less throwaway becomes a simultaneously simpler and richer life, because the focus is off consumption and on what really matters’ (Button, 2018, xiii).

Button, Tara. A Life Less Throwaway – The Art of Buying for Life: Harper Collins Publishers, 2018

https://uk.buymeonce.com/

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whatevernevermind · 6 years ago

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15 Ways To Learn SEO 2019 Effectively

Professional SEO solutions can lift your site over your competition. SEO is really the shortened phrase for search motor optimization. I believe SEO within 2019 will largely be such as SEO in 2018, with the particular exception of some big” Search engines update that wipes out sufficient websites to make people think the algorithms have grown significantly smarter. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION works by optimizing a cyberspace pages, conducting keyword research, plus earning inbound links. The organization offers excellent SEO packages that will help rank the clients' web site within top three pages associated with search engine pages. That can make SEO an ideal lead era tool, because when searchers adhere to links back to your web site, you have the chance in order to convert them to leads, plus later make sales. Whenever asked to point out principles that are unique towards the particular web, most people will arrive up with two main types: SEO and social media. How many links do a person need for good off-page SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION? If you are performing a professional SEO audit for the true business, you are going in order to have to think like the Google Search Quality Rater Along with a Google search engineer to supply real long-term value to the client. 44. Give your own social media profiles an SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION boost. 10% of our experts believe that will there's likely to be the lot of focus on cellular in 2019, as older SEOs realize optimizing for desktop is definitely pointless. White hat SEO is not really just about following guidelines, yet is about ensuring that the particular content the search engines indexes and consequently ranks could be the same content the user will see. Our six experts reveal their favorite SEO tips in addition to tactics for building big site visitors in 2018. Yes, all of us know it's still June plus we know it's only 2018 but if you haven't began planning and researching key tendencies which will affect you SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION in 2019 you could currently be falling behind. We furthermore take a look at just how new technologies like AI plus Voice search will begin in order to impact more on SEO since we move nearer to 2019 and beyond. Whenever every nation across the entire world is busy in making their own due contribution within the growth sector in their own method by taking the route associated with SEO service and online advertising, Singapore cannot stop stand nevertheless in one point. By 2019, content material marketing is set to turn out to be an industry worth $300 billion dollars. Off page SEO relates to the strategies performed further than your website that can end up being used to improve your research engine rankings. Due in order to the success of inbound marketing and advertising and SEO, more marketers are usually dedicated to improving their rating over other tactics. The best way to focus on these customers is by supplying high-quality SEO content that offers genuine and useful information toward the readers. Another method provides a different page based upon whether the page is getting requested with a human website visitor or a search engine, the strategy known as cloaking One more category sometimes used is greyish hat SEO This is within between black hat and whitened hat approaches, where the strategies employed avoid the site getting penalized, but do not work in producing the best articles for users. The Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) Keyword Electrical generator is like a thesaurus intended for SEO -minded content marketers. SEMRush - Another excellent tool for SEO analysis, especially where it concerns business cleverness, SEMRush allows you to recognize and analyze the keywords that will your competitors are using. I'm heading to share some of the most effective SEO tips that will I've used within all types of campaigns to increase organic research traffic. FAST SEO ADVICE search engine optimisation is not magic, and can not perform wonders. This SEO suggestions and tricks cover all the essential information you should know concerning Search Engine Optimization. The SEO content article writer should have a strong knowing of the keywords that are usually ranking and trending on the particular analytics framework. In 2018, there were certain trends of which ruled the world of e-commerce SEO (search engine optimization). Don't get frightened by them but make certain to use only natural hyperlinks and keep in mind that will their SEO potential may become a bit lower in assessment with single links. As a partner to the table, Internet lookup engine Land's Guide To SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION explains the ranking factors within more depth, within a tutorial offering tips and advice on applying them. Google states that cultural media is not an quick SEO ranking factor, but the majority of experts agree that things this kind of as retweets and facebook gives DO, in fact, effect websites' rankings. And since SEO furthermore targets users who are positively searching for products and providers like yours, the traffic ensuing from SEO is more certified than many other marketing techniques, leading to cost-savings for businesses.

If you work in research marketing, you'll know that SMX is one of the greatest search engine marketing conferences associated with the year, covering topics which includes SEO and PPC. SEO is conducted each on-site and off-site via various resources that are the existence of your web identity associated with different social media platform plus prominent display of your cyberspace link on other well-reputed web sites. Our unique data science-driven SEO & content marketing platform can help your eCommerce business discover millions of dollars' worth of earlier untapped organic search marketing possibilities. On the other hands, if the website doesn't make use of any digital marketing strategies or even SEO services, no one troubles to search for pages plus pages on Google just in order to find your website and go to it. Some dentists, who possess tried applying SEO, have not really been very successful in moving their website to the best of Google search engine. Just before we do, let's check out there a couple essential areas with regard to SEO: social media and cellular. SEO can price between $100 and $500 for each month if you do this yourself with a keyword study tool. This SEO manual explains acquiring links from exterior domains. Let's review the fundamentals of SEO (search engine optimization). SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is conducted on the knowning that webpages rank because associated with how relevant a webpage is definitely to a search query plus how many links point in order to that webpage. Business professionals try to rely on these SEO techniques regarding optimization wishing for a larger profit.

But undoubtedly, the acronym many people ask about is SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, or search engine optimization. Between this plus 2017's Best SEO Campaign prize from the UK Search Honours, it's clear the world is definitely starting to recognize Elephate because one of the most trustworthy SEO and Content Marketing companies in Europe. To understand how SEO functions to improve search rankings, most of us have to break it straight down a little. Whichever way you choose in order to categorize keywords, one of the particular most important steps in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION does keyword research. Some good examples of White Hat SEO consist of optimizing META tags, putting key phrases in URLs, submitting sites in order to directories, making sitemaps, obtaining hyperlinks on related sites, and generating keyword-optimized content. An SEO Executive optimizes internet sites to create them show up increased on search engines like search engines and gain more website website visitors. Nevertheless, the fresh trend in SEO is ideal for long-tail keywords and even more conversational searches. SEO is the great marketing tool for the particular websites promoting their businesses on the web. Still, the keyword element of SEO is becoming more and more difficult with Google Adwords concealing volume data. Making use of advanced Search engines semantic search algorithms, we link the gap between old college SEO and the new content material marketing. Tug has been appointed specifically to roll out a multi-lingual internet marketing campaign using its knowledge in international SEO and PAY-PER-CLICK.

User-generated content racks up serious SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION points by providing sites along with fresh content, bundles of inbound links, and sources for organically framing natural attributes. You'll find it right here Also really worth checking out there is Moz's Beginner's Explained SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, ” which you'll find right here, and the SEO Success Pyramid from Small Business Search Advertising. Off-page SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategy refers to the impact of a change in additional websites in your search rank. Bruce Clay-based set the standard for honest internet marketing by authoring the particular " SEO Code of Integrity, " now translated into eighteen languages, and it has already been a respected leader within the particular ever-changing research engine marketing industry since mil novecentos e noventa e seis. Website SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (including, content optimisation, meta optimization, the significance of links). A good SEO Specialist is someone who else is an expert on the particular topic of search engine marketing. Just since a proper On-page and Off-page SEO optimization work will provide a better Ranking to your own website in Search Engine Outcome Page (SERP). The greatest SEO change and pattern I realize already happening within 2018 is Google's switch in order to a mobile-first index, so when a site is not however mobile-friendly and optimized for this, it's critical to prioritize this particular as it is now basic for its SEO success. With good on-page SEO, research engines can easily index your own web pages, understand what your own site is about, and effortlessly navigate the structure and content material of your website, thus rating your site accordingly. SEO companies are able to track almost every aspect of their technique, like increases in rankings, visitors and conversions. The strategies which were the simplest (reciprocal links or directory submissions) perform not work anymore, therefore the particular SEOs spend a lot associated with time trying different approaches. The particular Moz Pro is another place of Tools that check the particular important factors related to your own website's search ranking. Selection of key phrases or phrases plays an important component in an SEO campaign considering that it saves you the photos in the dark. In 2019 the particular digital marketing companies can anticipate a lot of voice lookups, and by 2020, about 50 percent of the searches will become either voice searches or image-based searches. Read our Mobile SEO 2019 Checklist before you decide in order to implement. This first element of optimizing images is usually including your keywords in this image file name (seo_guide. jpg). The inevitable modifications that will occur in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION in the near future are usually abolition of keywords stuffing plus spam backlinks, real-time personalized customer support by online marketers, improvement within the quality of visual articles as a result of development of video SEO, optimization associated with websites with conversational keywords plus generating massive quantity of current data. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION remains one of the lengthy term marketing strategies that function best for companies that are usually looking to improve their on the internet visibility.

It helps your SEO initiatives to ensure that your keyword phrases are added to the coto description and it will provide you a ranking boost when your specific terms are obvious in this area. Moreover, a Google Penguin update drastically changed the part of backlinks on SEO, doing it more difficult to obtain link juice to a internet site. Gone are the times of traditional SEO techniques, on the internet content is changing. The cognitiveSEO Rank System offers accurate country, language plus city precision for all your own tracked keywords. Even if your URLs not necessarily pretty, ” if you may feel as though they're adversely impacting users and your company in general, don't change all of them to be more keyword concentrated for better SEO. ” In case The Latest Trend In SEO 2019 you do need to alter your URL structure, make certain to make use of the proper (301 permanent) type of redirect. In this particular post, we've broken down the particular very best SEO techniques to assist you skyrocket your rankings plus boost your number of regular monthly visitors. An accessible URL is definitely an important SEO ranking element. Heidi Cohen: To increase 2018 SEO results, marketers will proceed moving away from disposable, after and done content. They concentrate on SEO Internet marketing objectives and provide top search motor rank like Google and Bing. Collectively, these developments are plus can continue to have the dramatic impact on the method in which we search optimize our websites in 2019 plus form the core of the newest SEO 2019 update briefing. SEO differs from local lookup engine optimization in that the particular latter is targeted on customization a business' online presence therefore that its web pages is usually going to be displayed simply by search engines when a consumer enters a local search intended for its products or services. The challenge for webmasters plus SEO is that Google won't want business people to rank with regard to lots of keywords using autogenerated content especially when that creates A LOT of pages upon a website using (for instance) a list of keyword variants page-to-page. In time, the collection between social media marketing management, channel advancement, and SEO will be considerably blurrier than it really will be today. In 2016, SEO experts possess determined which factors are nearly all likely to affect your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION rankings. Customers and marketers will need in order to begin implementing multiple forms associated with digital marketing tactics including compensated search, social media marketing, nearby SEO, in addition to SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION if they hope to rule a given Google SERP. Before beginning with this, the SEO professionals should visit your business and realize each and every aspect associated with your company so that they will can help your achieve your own marketing goals. What really matters in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION in 2018 is what a person prioritise today to ensure that will in 3-6 months you may see improvements in the high quality of your organic traffic. Mobile will account for 72% of US digital ad invest by 2019. forty five. Use Google Analytics to determine social SEO factors like the particular number of owned and optimistic results. The common SEO issue for e-commerce sites is that product evaluation functionality tends to rely upon AJAX, iframes, or subdomains, which usually make it very hard, or even even impossible, for search motors to fit product reviews with item pages. Local SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is an effective way in order to market your business online. With regard to more on Squarespace's SEO-friendly features plus how to use them, check out Increasing your site's visibility in order to search engines. For Ecommerce websites, SEO agencies can see which usually paths users take in purchase to complete a sale, almost all the way down to which usually keyword they used to research for you prior to buying. Continue to increase your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION to construct Blog9T business and drive traffic plus rank for more terms. SEO refers in order to the process of gaining a good impressive rank in search motor listings. Organic SEO will be also less costly long-term when you establish search credibility, as very long as you maintain it along with the consistent creation of high quality content and social media utilization. Within the 6th section of our SEO for rookies guide, we will discuss hyperlink building - one of the particular most important aspects of research engine optimization. Search engine optimization can furthermore be known as SEO plus it is defined as the technique or procedure for enhancing the website within an efficient and efficient way in purchase to make a good existence on major search engines. Search Motor Optimization (SEO) is the technique to campaign your products on the internet towards the right clientele intended for increasing ROI. There are many tools upon the web to assist along with basic keyword research (including the particular Google Keyword Planner tool and there are even more useful third party SEO tools to help you perform this). The biggest change that will we'll see in 2019 (and that's already happening) is the particular fact that keywords are getting less important. Once you've discovered your keywords, use another SEMrush tool, the SEO Content Design template, which is part of their particular Content Marketing Toolkit, to function out the best way in order to optimize your content. If a company is providing you all these services below one roof, climbing up the particular SEO ranking will not end up being an uphill task for your own business any more. Local SEO companies allows a person to position your business upon search engines like google plus other digital marketing platforms therefore you're seen by potential clients — on their terms. YouTube adds the particular nofollow” tag to their hyperlinks, so they don't really assist with SEO. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION isn't just about building lookup engine-friendly websites. The sooner you understand exactly why Google is sending you much less traffic than it did this past year, the sooner you can clear it up and focus upon proactive SEO that starts to effect your rankings in a optimistic way. The trending SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION technique or strategy now plus in 2019 will be Lookup Enterprise Optimization It has already been coined by myself since 2015. UnGagged London, uk is really a 2-day SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING & Digital Marketing conference that will takes place June 11-12th, together with one-day intensive masterclasses on 06 13th. These ‘quality updates' are very reminiscent of Search engines Panda updates and often effect many websites at the exact same time - and often these types of concentrate on demoting similar ‘low-quality' SEO techniques we have already been told Panda focuses on. I think savvy SEOs are going to utilize AI content generation (text and pictures especially) in 2019 to produce a whole new kind associated with search algorithm gaming, that might almost be viewed as dark hat. This course covers how in order to build strong links for much better SEO. SEO companies ensure that will your site has all associated with the SEO Internet marketing like as business improvement, localized item sales, high quality online era and the rest. 2018 brought many adjustments to the world of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION, including a few new formula evolutions through Google. An expert Seo agency may help any dimensions of company take full advantage of web marketing and boost the likelihood associated with actual sales while simultaneously boost brand awareness one of the particular customers segment. Recently we were speaking about the subject with the friendly agency in Valencia plus we directed to this access of Search Engine Journal along with the 20 questions that need to be done to any SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION or SEO agency that desires to hire. In 2018, SEO is content and articles is SEO, content is electronic and digital is content. Before starting a good SEO project, site owners ought to carefully read through the site owner guidelines that every search motors provides and follow recommended greatest practices. This is clear that when website owners hire a search engine marketing SEO expert, they stand the better chance of maximizing their particular SEO services. Search motors cannot understand this type associated with content, so it's vital that you design and style video pages in an SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION oriented manner. Subscribe to our weekly SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and daily SearchCap newsletters for a summarize of all the latest SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION related news, tips and strategies from Internet search engine Property and other sources all more than the Web. When you aren't logged in, go to SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Toolkit » Keyword Research » Keyword Overview. For virtually any SEO technique to operate successfully you will need content and that will can come in any type like keywords, articles or websites. From 2019, AI will certainly be utilized by the businesses to acquire higher rankings upon search engines. For that reason, it can be a great idea to incorporate expenses intended for professional SEO content in your own quarterly marketing budget. Google will see right via sneaky, black hat SEO strategies like creating duplicate pages, producing pages with thin content simply for the sake of obtaining more pages and buying inbound links. The Technical Audit Checklist Produced For Human Beings — Within this post by Distilled, a person will find a link in order to a Google sheet that offers an technical SEO audit directory and links to resources upon how to complete each checkbox. Then each time the phrase SEO appears on your web site, it's automatically changed into the link you specified. Keyword Analysis for SEO: The Definitive Guideline — This comprehensive guide simply by Brian Dean teaches you the number of strategies for locating keywords and determining intent regarding your target market. On-page and off-page SEO function together to improve your lookup engine rankings in complementary style; however, SEOs generally advise obtaining your on-page SEO ducks within a row before focusing as well much on off-page SEO. Within 2019, web-based businesses will embrace more voice-to-text technology to enhance engagement and search activity. There are many SEO sites suggesting that they can supply a service to make our own website LSI friendly, or fulfill ‘LSI requirements'. The particular art of web SEO is situated in focusing on how individuals search for things and knowing what type of results Search engines wants to (or will) screen to its users. Social press SEO would encourage your present customers to come back whilst helping you develop authority regarding potential ones. He is an expert in SEO, Content Marketing, plus Pinterest Marketing. An SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION expert plays a huge part in helping companies build their own businesses and attract new clients through website traffic. All of us wished to look at a massive group that included businesses of almost all sizes and in all industrial sectors so we could really notice how SEO traffic increased whenever the only common denominator was including reviews to their site. In reality, this is section of the SEO technique we have used to gradually grow our organic traffic throughout the last 12 months right here at SnapApp: #3. Mobile will certainly account for 72% of ALL OF US digital ad spend by 2019. This workshop will be designed to help business proprietors implement Digital Marketing techniques intended for their business including social press, organic SEO as well since paid channels. The Beginner's Guide in order to SEO continues to be study over 3 million times plus offers comprehensive information you require to get on the road to professional quality Search Motor Optimization, or SEO. Whether it's using web analytics for carrying out research or even conversion tools that monitor plus report the usage of essential keywords, SEO agencies know just how and where you can obtain the information they need in order to save time furthermore decrease your in-house price. Generally there is probably no more simple strategy for SEO than the particular integration of internal links straight into your site - it is definitely an easy way to improve traffic to individual pages, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Consult says. SEO SERVICES Generally there are a number of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION services which can help enhance the organic search engine ratings of a website.

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claraoswald81 · 6 years ago

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You Will Never Thought That Knowing SEO 2019 Could Be So Beneficial!

The particular search engine optimization (SEO) is definitely an important design feature associated with the website that enables the particular spider or robot to effortlessly access it, thereby increasing the visibility on the internet. If you understand you might have VERY lower-quality doorway pages on your own site, a person should remove them or re-think your SEO strategy if a person want to rank high within Google for the long phrase. One of the issues search engines like yahoo and Bing have usually attempted to overcome is knowing which external links exist exclusively for SEO purposes and which usually links represent a true indicator that the source content is definitely of value to the visitors. 2018 has currently seen some particularly significant SEO paradigm shifts from Mobile First” in order to the ever-advancing Rankbrain machine-learning criteria. Content marketing will be a bigger approach which along with SEO forms a part associated with your digital marketing strategy. What You Should Know: This future of search engine optimisation is Semantic SEO. Links plus technical SEO are the biggest pieces of the pie, yet multimedia efforts such as movie, photos, and podcasts will end up being the game changer and differentiator in many competitive markets. Occasional, and We do more occasional and not really frequent, usage of keywords plus keyword phrases in these hyperlinks may also help very somewhat in your SEO processes. Excelling at SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION means serving your visitors—not simply search engines. Here arrives the idea of SEO or even search engine optimization. The particular fact remains that SEO providers assure clients that even in case the site will not position among the top search motors like google, the money can not be a waste credited to the refund. Performing SEO upon your own websites is the great method to practice plus hone your SEO ability. We optimize your web site both of internal and exterior factors thats Google's engine rely on and reliable for top position search result, Gurantee your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION ranking No succeed can refundable. Looking deeper: An SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION cost often means one associated with two things: the investment inside your organic search strategy, or just how much you pay for compensated search engine marketing (SEM) providers like Google AdWords. All of us are dealing with new methods designed to target old design SEO tactics and that concentrate around the truism that DOMAIN NAME ‘REPUTATION' plus Plenty of WEBPAGES plus SEO equals Plenty associated with Keywords equals LOTS of Search engines traffic. BrightonSEO is a one-day search marketing and advertising conference and series of education courses held, unsurprisingly, in Brighton. From narrowing lower target markets to changing the particular way content is written, AI and voice search will possess a continuous effect on SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION moving forward. One aspect of SEO is usually link building, which we may discuss slightly below, which frequently leads to thin content. Applications for the particular 2018-2019 cycle of the SEO Improve programme are now closed in addition to will re-open again in Planting season 2019. SEO could be complex because search engines are often reevaluating and changing how they will prioritize search engine results. Moreover, it will help SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION by gaining backlinks, likes, responses or shares. Based on SEO software program company Moz's bi-yearly survey upon search engine ranking factors, the particular titles on your page are usually one of the nine nearly all important considerations a search motor makes. Having an SEO technique that effectively promotes your picture taking business, driving new traffic plus taking into consideration the requires of the site visitors while you concentrate on perfecting the art is a really effective tool. SEO is Research Engine Optimization and it will be required for make a internet site view-able. And you will see the section on exactly where to use keywords for even more information on integrating these key phrases into your SEO content technique. 22. Use social media in order to boost local SEO. SEO is the acronym for Seo. Even though certain techniques of SEO content material remain the same, like not really compromising on quality; there are usually definitely techniques which have progressed from the past and a person should find out whether your own SEO articles writing services are usually very well aware of that will or not. SEO service suppliers are specialized in increasing the particular traffic to your site simply by increasing your position in the particular search engine ranking positions. Appeal to international people to your sites with these SEO tips. The top challenges within organic SEO are link constructing (easy-to-get links no more possess much value) and keyword study (the low-hanging fruit is lengthy gone). For illustration, the word ‘SEO tips' is furthermore included inside the less aggressive phrase ‘SEO tips 2019', which usually is searched for too. You may generally see outcomes of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION efforts once the webpage proceeds to be crawled and listed by a internet search motor. Most likely the best form of interpersonal media to pay attention in order to when turning to SEO is definitely Google Plus. 1 of the most successful methods to ensure your clients locate your photography business is simply by implementing an SEO strategy, this particular is more than just producing it to number 1 upon Google, it means ensuring that will a varied and steady flow of traffic is proceeding to your site, over and even above that of your opponents. If you are usually willing to improvise your site search and boost up your own Google ranking, but do not really have time or resources intended for doing that, hire an SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION specialist for the same objective. Mobile SEO will be mobile search engine optimization or even optimizing content for a much better search ranking. Titles on pages and explanations affect what people see within search results, so it's important to check these out within any SEO audit. Search motors give some guidelines for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, but big search engines maintain result ranking as a industry secret. Along with $80 billion forecast to turn out to be spent annually on SEO — and content marketing set to be able to be considered a $300+ billion industry by simply 2019 — it might always be tempting for stakeholders to discover SEO and content marketing since cost centers rather than profits centers. While that will theory is sound (when concentrated on a single page, when the particular intent is to deliver energy content to a Google user) using old school SEO methods on especially a large web site spread out across many webpages seems to amplify site high quality problems, after recent algorithm adjustments, and so this type associated with optimisation without keeping track associated with overall site quality is self-defeating in the long run. While her business, web traffic, plus customer base grow, Sue will certainly require some outside support regarding keeping her SEO on monitor so she can certainly still sell this best shoes on the obstruct. Whilst links continue to be essential and it's incredibly difficult in order to rank well without links through other websites, content and on-page SEO has become increasingly essential. For businesses searching to raise their search ranks, what this means is that will a comprehensive social media technique may be in order - within addition to all of the particular usual SEO tactics. Because of protocol changes and the trend in order to more local searches, it actually is no longer an huge cost to implement good SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. Whether you're killing it along with SEO, or struggling to split How To Get People To Like SEO 2019 the very first page, a good SEO audit can assist give your own rankings a shot within the particular arm. According to web marketing experts, the impact associated with AI and Voice Browse SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION can be expected in 2019 after that. Which it. If you'd like in order to speak to us about a good SEO campaign, or even multilingual SEO marketing and keyword study then get in touch associated with just start a live conversation if we're around. Moreover, Google will carry on to elevate the importance associated with usability and technical SEO aspects, for example site security, page velocity, mobile friendliness, and navigability. As a consultant, he or she has helped many different businesses—including, Lonely Planet, Zillow, Tower Information, and literally numerous medium plus small businesses—with SEO and online-marketing advice. You discuss core SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategies and tactics used in order to drive more organic search qualified prospects to a specific website or even set of websites, as properly as tactics to avoid in order to prevent penalization from search motors. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Smart links allows you in order to specify a word, like 'SEO' and then link it in order to a post on your web site. It's great for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION to feed the search motors a good amount of keyword-rich links. Sites making use of organic SEO in the strict sense is going to end up being much like organisms, meaning these people will grow, expand and adjust over time according to readers' desires. No matter the business, the age of business, or even status of competitors, every company should at least implement simple SEO strategies to help their particular offerings get found on Search engines. So your SEO if your own thinking mobile, needs to end up being either responsive or app-store technique with the right dimensions, style, user-friendly, UX experience. Dark hat SEO methods, such because the use of keyword filling and link farming, can furthermore boost organic SEO. SEO is usually important in every area associated with advertising, marketing, design, optimization, video clip, content, mobile and e-commerce, regarding without SEO all is untuned in need of synchronization, as an orchestra of musicians without a good experienced conductor. Unfortunately, 95% of links through SEO link building never provide a single new visitor in order to your website. SEO specialists started in order to abuse PageRank in order in order to raise the rankings. Now could be a great time to take a nearer take a look at SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION marketing information because search is getting even worse for those types of B2B plus B2C businesses. SEO marketers plus writers typically come up along with different kinds of content in order to place the necessary keywords within. These are some of the particular most used types, and every one helps to help with the level of variety in conditions of website content. Certain black hat SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION techniques, such as keyword filling, are viewed as to be the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION equivalent of spamming, and lookup engines will penalize them. Internet marketing is exclusively driven by SEO or lookup engine optimization. Others are usually simply traditional PR firms who else have learned SEO as properly as the value of hyperlinks. Here's a cliche among electronic marketers: Search engine optimization (SEO) isn't what used to become. Google announced that will they released several minor enhancements over the period of the particular time of about a 7 days and after analysis, experts inside the SEO industry concluded that will the updates were the outcome of keyword permutations and web site using doorway pages. SEO, or Search Motor Optimization, means setting up your own website and content to show up through online search results. People which want to take their company to some new height plus generally and mostly believe within the way of SEO marketing and advertising. Given that research engines have complex algorithms that will power their technology and every person's marketing needs are unique, wish unable to provide specific SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION advice to our customers. We all think SEO in 2019 will discover a shift to focusing much more on user intent, problem resolving, and hyper locality in purchase to capitalize on the ongoing rise of voice search. Private demographic information would come in a great deal handier in 2019 as considerably as the ranking of key phrases is concerned. Links are one of the particular most important SEO ranking elements. However, more advanced that will readers will recognize the reduce quality of sites employing dark hat SEO at the cost from the reader experience, which usually will reduce the site's visitors and page rank over period. So - THERE IS SIMPLY NO BEST PRACTICE AMOUNT OF HEROES any SEO could lay down since exact best practice to GUARANTEE a title may display, in full in Search engines, at least, because the search little title, on every device. While getting as many pages listed in Google was historically the priority for an SEO, Search engines is now rating the high quality of pages on the site plus the type of pages this really is indexing. Jerrika Scott, Digital Marketing Specialist in Archway Cards Ltd, also feels in voice being the pattern of 2019 rather than 2018. Today, regardless of all the hype about regardless of whether SEO is dead, we discover that organic search is nevertheless one of the highest RETURN ON INVESTMENT digital marketing channels. The sensible strategy for SEO would certainly still appear to be in order to reduce Googlebot crawl expectations plus consolidate ranking equity & possible in high-quality canonical pages plus you do that by reducing duplicate or near-duplicate content. This can take a LONG period for a site to recuperate from using black hat SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION tactics and fixing the difficulties will never necessarily bring organic visitors back as it was prior to a penalty. The particular best SEO Guide is right here to dispel those myths, plus give you all you require to know about SEO in order to show up on the internet and some other search engines, and ultimately make use of SEO to grow your company. > > Upon Page Optimization: On-page SEO will be the act of optimizing single pages with a specific finish goal to rank higher plus acquire more important movement within web crawlers. There are several websites providing pertinent information regarding SEO and online marketing, and you may learn from them. But it's confusing why some businesses don't try out harder with analysis, revisions, plus new content with their SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION online marketing strategy. An effective SEO strategy can be made up of a mix of elements that ensure your web-site is trusted by both customers as well as the lookup engines. By taking their particular marketing needs online and employing confer with an experienced SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION agency, a business will be able to achieve thousands, or even millions associated with people that they would have got not been able to normally. forty five. Use Google Analytics to calculate social SEO factors like the particular number of owned and beneficial results. The common SEO issue for e-commerce sites is that product evaluation functionality tends to rely upon AJAX, iframes, or subdomains, which usually make it very hard, or even even impossible, for search motors to fit product reviews with item pages. Local SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is an effective way in order to market your business online. Intended for more on Squarespace's SEO-friendly features plus how to use them, check out Increasing your site's visibility in order to search engines. For Ecommerce websites, SEO agencies can see which usually paths users take in purchase to complete a sale, most the way down to which usually keyword they used to research for you prior to buying. Continue to increase your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION to construct business and drive traffic plus rank for more terms. SEO refers in order to the process of gaining a good impressive rank in search motor listings. Organic SEO is usually also less costly long-term while you establish search credibility, as very long as you maintain it along with the consistent creation of high quality content and social media use. Within the 6th section of our SEO for beginners guide, we will discuss hyperlink building - one of the particular most important aspects of lookup engine optimization. Search engine optimization can furthermore be known as SEO plus it is defined as the technique or procedure for customizing the website within an efficient and efficient way in purchase to make a good existence on major search engines. An extensive dental marketing plus dental SEO campaign can become attained by the enterprise just if the web address associated with a dental practice contains in to all the promotional materials with regard to the business. This shows the importance of focussing voice search engine results within order to grow your company, marketing, and Search Engine Optimization(SEO) strategies. They obtain this by increasing their web site rank through a method known as SEO or even search engine optimization. Just like most other SEO approaches, be certain your links are appropriate, plus be careful never to cross the particular line into excessive linking : you don't want your guests to obtain annoyed. Bryan Yeager, Research Director at Gartner, will certainly share 9 Key Insights through Gartner's Marketing Technology Survey in order to Help You Prepare for 2019 and Beyond. SEO is a combination associated with digital marketing efforts all functioning together to increase a website's value to users and presence in search. On-page SEO (also identified as "on-site" SEO) will be the work of optimizing different parts associated with your site that affect your own search engine rankings. In 2019, we will have to optimize voice lookup answers with CTAs that Google's algorithms don't pick up upon, but humans do. Dan Mallette, Lead SEO Strategist at each InVue Digital & HearstDMS, forecasts that SEOs will need in order to optimize for voice search and discover new avenues as SERP real-estate shrinks. Obviously, a social networking webpage that has more interaction will bring bigger SEO benefits for you to some business than one that will has less interaction, but only having a social presence will be a good start. Because it turns out, there's more in order to on-page SEO than optimizing with regard to keywords. Search engines motor optimization (organic SEO) describes the particular methods used to obtain the high placement (or ranking) upon a search engine results web page in unpaid, algorithm-driven results upon the given search engine. Also, videos include a lot of untapped possible - great for SEO and even make for good user proposal. The extremely best SEO expert 2019 may tell you for High-End mobile devices, we're seeing more format changes to focus, provide the better experience, search results. Social SEO is especially helpful for online reputation administration. It isn't just the approach that Google ranks optimized written content, but the way that that they rank poorly constructed or taboo content that will push your current ranking to where it really should to be in 2019. Ray Cheselka, SEO & Google adwords Manager at SEO and style agency, webFEAT Complete, predicts that will sites with over a 2 second load time will become penalized, and search intent will be going to always grow within importance. SEO consists of ordering the site's architecture and hyperlinks to make pages inside the particular website easier to find plus navigate. In contrast, content material that no one is humming about have minimal effect upon social SEO. They are usually generally knowledgeable within the are usually of both SEO and content material marketing. When it arrives to reviews, customers work as a good army of link builders plus keyword writers so your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION structure is shaped without a person having to lift a little finger. SEO is really the shortened phrase for search motor optimization. I believe SEO within 2019 will largely be such as SEO in 2018, with the particular exception of some big” Search engines update that wipes out sufficient websites to make people think the algorithms have grown significantly smarter. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION works by optimizing a home page's pages, conducting keyword research, plus earning inbound links. The business offers excellent SEO packages that will help rank the clients' web site within top three pages associated with search engine pages. That can make SEO an ideal lead era tool, because when searchers adhere to links back to your web site, you have the chance in order to convert them to leads, plus later make sales. Whenever asked to point out principles that are unique towards the particular web, most people will arrive up with two main types: SEO and social media. How many links do a person need for good off-page SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION? If you are performing Blog9T a professional SEO audit to get a genuine business, you are going in order to have to think like the Google Search Quality Rater And also a Google search engineer to supply real long-term value to the client. 44. Give your own social media profiles an SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION boost. 10% of our experts believe that will there's likely to be the lot of focus on cellular in 2019, as older SEOs realize optimizing for desktop is usually pointless. White hat SEO is not really just about following guidelines, yet is about ensuring that the particular content google search indexes and consequently ranks could be the same content the user will see. Keep in mind that will links, content, and user expertise are all major SEO rank factors. Could holistic approach will ultimately eliminate a lot of the particular issues created by some SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION practitioners over the years, I actually suspect that search engines' technicians will initially overestimate the accuracy of their AI, resulting within Penguin-level collateral damage. SEO (Search Motor Optimization) is the process associated with making a website more noticeable in search results, also called improving search rankings. Siteimprove SEO furthermore provides in-tool tips on where to start as well as how to get the most out associated with your keyword research and supervising. We've already been operating in the SEO plus content marketing industry since last year and know how search motors work. Right now there are a great number associated with resources out there surrounding competing link analysis (and a great deal that have been authored simply by me! ) but whenever We speak with people that are usually working on SEO projects, really always one of those "yeah, I understand I should do this more" tasks. Amy Kilvington, Marketing Executive at Custom Drapes, believes that SEOs are heading to have to optimize social media marketing more as Google indexes this and prioritizes it over their particular sites' pages. Social media will be the easiest and most efficient way to push the SEO-based content. However, right now there are some easy adjustments that will you can make to the particular search engine optimization (SEO) component of it, which will ideally enable you to get fantastic results. 55 The difference from SEO is the majority of simply depicted as the distinction between paid and unpaid concern ranking searching results. I get into much more detail in SEO Titles on pages: 15-Point Checklist for B2B and B2C Brands, which explains the right way to work in relevant keywords that will accurately reflect the page articles. Are good nevertheless SEO potential may be decrease in comparison to single links. The training behind our SEO expertise has been developed from years and yrs of learning from mistakes marketing and advertising with our other businesses. Our own in-depth guide contains the most recent SEO best practices so a person can improve how your content appears in search results, plus get more traffic, leads, plus sales. Keyword analysis definitely belongs to the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION basics. I'll start by stating that social mass media and SEO are heavily linked to each other. Black head wear SEO attempts to improve ranks in ways that are disapproved of from the search engines, or even involve deception. This particular is more tedious and tasking than inorganic SEO because this particular is how all the key phrases get a full blast associated with attention. SEO: It stands for Research Engine Optimization. Within this post, we'll break this down in the complete first timers guide to SEO: what SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is, how it works, exactly what factors affect search and exactly what sorts of changes you may make today to improve your own search optimization. The no follow hyperlink has been contradicted many periods over where SEO is included and it depends on the particular web owner concerning if they will allow them on the web site or not.

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supervillainproject · 6 years ago

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You Should Experience SEO 2019 At Least Once In Your Lifetime And Here's Why

A wide range of SEO techniques exist with regard to improving the search engine search positions of web sites and their own individual pages. By merging a new way to work along with SEO and prioritized lists associated with recommendations—not to mention competitor evaluation and keyword monitoring—Siteimprove SEO is definitely your all-in-one tool to develop traffic, prove ROI, and effortlessly create content. All the SEO styles listed here may have started in late 2017 or earlier 2018, but their true advantage could be reaped in 2019. Google's Ruben Mueller said on Twitter, along with the disclaimer of him placing his user hat on (ofcourse not Google hat), that relabeling older content as new, with simply no additional changes is a poor SEO hack. All of us associated with creatives, designers & developers function alongside our SEO & articles teams to ideate, research, style & create remarkable infographics and interactive content for brands that will get shared across the internet. Contemporary SEO strategy may be the process associated with organizing a website's content simply by topic, which helps search engines like yahoo realize a user's intent when looking. Page loading time is dependent upon Page Load speed, Web page loading time is one associated with the important factors in Portable SEO 2017. Public Media as a platform are unable to be ignored in any SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION plan. Seo stands with regard to search engine optimization, when a person are searching for an SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION or Search Engine Optimization Firm then you needs to appear for various factors which may have a favorable and undesirable affect on your business. SEO focuses upon rankings in the organic (non-paid) search results. SEO hence helps you get traffic coming from search engines. With Ahrefs, a great kick off point for keyword research intended for SEO is the Keywords Explorer tool. Topics: SEO, backlink, articles marketing, social media marketing plus advertising, analytics, and more. 60+ sessions on hot topics, achievement stories and strategies in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION, SEA, PPC, Social Media, On-line Marketing and SMX Future Trail. 2018 (I believe) will be a lot associated with catch up on current SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION themes, with the biggest trends” occurring around voice queries to find results. Therefore, SEOmonitor tracks all of the appropriate data that could influence SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION performance and displays it within the Keyword Events Timeline. If you forget that will quality content is a best priority, then you can definitely forget about having an SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategy. The particular way we asking the device is different from person in order to person. therefore, optimizing your site 100% mobile friendly to accomplish cellular voice search is very essential to SEO 2019. I actually am just newbie and significantly i do get frustrated whenever articles doesn't rank on best or near top, but individuals like you and many additional also inspire me to never ever give up. There are various points that i wasn't identified up to now but appreciate to you, you are usually make us learn important issues about seo. The traditional method to SEO has been devoted to creating excellent content that will is easily searchable via lookup engine bots. To realize SEO, you'll also need in order to know how Google search functions. 2019 will certainly still use many of these types of newly implemented tactics, but research engine optimization experts are likewise suggesting there will be a lot more. Currently more than half associated with searches account for mobile products, and the number will definitely move up in 2019. Within the remaining 2018 quarter, a person need to invest in mobile-first content that will rank a person higher in mobile search within 2019. The vast majority of your SEO learning ought to come from online resources, yet there are a few textbooks that will help you conceptually understand the history of research, search engines, and how SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION has changed through the yrs. There are numerous methods that webmasters use within order to entice potential clients to their site—one of the particular most important and effective associated with those being Seo (SEO). SEO is important for a lot of companies because if individuals find you with a web research and find what they're searching for, you can receive plenty of new web visitors that will can help you earn even more money. Good SEO follows guidelines that Search engines determines are best practices in order to have your articles ranked upon top. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION services do thorough keyword study for any specific website, and after that optimize the information on the particular basis of these keywords plus theme of website. Based on SEO software program company Moz's bi-yearly survey upon search engine ranking factors, the particular titles on your page are usually one of the nine nearly all important considerations a search motor makes. Having an SEO method that effectively promotes your picture taking business, driving new traffic plus taking into consideration the requires of the site visitors although you concentrate on perfecting your own art is a really effective tool. SEO is Research Engine Optimization and it is definitely required for make a site view-able. And you could see the section on exactly where to use keywords for even more information on integrating these key phrases into your SEO content technique. 22. Use social media in order to boost local SEO. SEO is the acronym for Seo. Even though certain techniques of SEO articles Blog9T remain the same, like not really compromising on quality; there are usually definitely techniques which have advanced from the past and a person should find out whether your own SEO articles writing services are usually very well aware of that will or not. SEO service suppliers are specialized in increasing the particular traffic to your site simply by increasing your position in the particular search engine ranking positions. Bring in international people to your web sites with these SEO tips. The top challenges within organic SEO are link developing (easy-to-get links no more have got much value) and keyword analysis (the low-hanging fruit is lengthy gone). For illustration, the word ‘SEO tips' is furthermore included inside the less aggressive phrase ‘SEO tips 2019', which usually is searched for too. If you may look after SEO, you may get lost among the trillions of links out there. Heading forward SEOs have to end up being able to quantitatively show the particular value of their online marketing and advertising by identifying and implementing Crucial Performance Indicators (KPIs) that may demonstrate the value added simply by their SEO initiatives. The topic cluster model will be your way forward in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION this year, but it's not really the only method to obtain your website content to position higher once it's been produced. WIthout simple SEO in spot, your business may not become a result on the look for engines when a customer is definitely specifically searching for your organization! SEO information can help improve your interpersonal efforts, and social media may help with the search rankings. Within his book Ultimate Facts Customization Your Website, SEO and web marketing expert Jon Rognerud displays you how to develop a top-end website and get top position on all search engines. 00: 38 SEO is usually heading towards voice search. SpyFu will be really a paid tool that will uses 11 years of traditional data to help you discover your competitors' most profitable key phrases and the keywords they've utilized for SEO and ads. The simple truth is that on-site navigation hackers like search bar with smart autocomplete, internal linking with point texts or immediate customer assistance boost both UX and SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. Even though it is difficult to assume about the alterations that might take place within 2019, but we know with regard to sure what SEO trends regarding 2018 will take greater popularity in 2019. Register and raise the free donation for SEO Greater london every time you shop on the web. Local SEO - Optimize that localized content on your internet site to properly leverage local signs, online reviews and business entries. Learn more about content material optimization for SEO here. Along with paid-search it offers a very focused audience, visitors referred by SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION will only visit your web site if they are seeking particular home elevators your products or even related content. From keyword ingrdient filling to link buying, the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION landscape has seen numerous black-hat tricks — and Google often catches on. Chris Gregory, founder plus managing partner at Jacksonville dependent firm, DAGMAR Marketing, predicts that will AI and machine learning might have a big impact upon SEO in 2019 and SEOs who aren't technical will become left in the dust. Some SEO professionals also advise that anchor textual content should be varied as a lot of pages linking to one web page using the same anchor textual content may look suspicious to look motors. SEO trickery such because keyword ‘stuffing' in irrelevant written content simply won't cut it within the current day, with Google's algorithm taking over 200 components to ensure that it's ratings provide results with valid and even authoritative sites, it is next to on impossible to perform anything additional than work with the research engines to make sure best quality SEO results. From a SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION perspective, the principal keyword need to be at the beginning adopted by the other relevant key phrases. For blog websites the greatest SEO practice would be in order to set the title of your own post in a heading1 label. Search engines is the gatekeeper to enormous amounts of traffic and prospects - search engine optimization (SEO) opens the doors. Simply because long as they are gained naturally, inbound links are most likely the most dependable authority contractors in the world of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. All of us call this new methodology AdaptiveSEO so that as its title suggests, it is made in order to adapt to the evolving plus sometimes unexpected changes in research algorithms. Several get confused in this region of SEO article writing recommendations for either they in place too little or maybe the particular wrong kind of keywords, or even they mention the keyword method too much which is occasionally called keyword over stuffing. Social SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION isn't a separate branch associated with SEO and it won't quickly be replacing traditional SEO, yet social signals are becoming significantly incorporated into search engine methods. Perhaps the particular most important aspect of research engine optimization is how a person can actually leverage SEO in order to assist drive more relevant visitors, leads, and sales for your own business. Just browse through the various types of our SEO blog page to find those important on-page ranking factors. According to him, key phrases have already lost their significance and in 2019 this craze would only get stronger. Seo (SEO) will be the most efficient way in order to drive traffic to your site. Our six experts reveal their favorite SEO tips plus tactics for building big targeted traffic in 2018. Yes, all of us know it's still June plus we know it's only 2018 but if you haven't began planning and researching key styles which will affect you SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION in 2019 you could currently be falling behind. We furthermore take a look at exactly how new technologies like AI plus Voice search will begin in order to impact more on SEO since we move nearer to 2019 and beyond. Whenever every nation across the globe is busy in making their particular due contribution within the advancement sector in their own method by taking the route associated with SEO service and online advertising, Singapore cannot stop stand nevertheless in one point. By 2019, content material marketing is set to turn out to be an industry worth $300 billion dollars. Off page SEO pertains to the strategies performed past your website that can end up being used to improve your lookup engine rankings. Due in order to the success of inbound marketing and advertising and SEO, more marketers are usually dedicated to improving their position over other tactics. The best way to focus on these customers is by supplying high-quality SEO content that offers genuine and useful information in the direction of the readers. Another method provides a different page based upon whether the page is getting requested with a human guest or a search engine, the strategy known as cloaking An additional category sometimes used is greyish hat SEO This is within between black hat and whitened hat approaches, where the strategies employed avoid the site becoming penalized, but do not work in producing the best articles for users. Carrying out technical SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION for local search engines is usually really a similar process. Search engine optimization (SEO) will be a way to generate even more (and desired) traffic to your own site with the help associated with better search engine rankings intended for a keyword. SEO had gone through drastic changes over the yrs and getting higher rankings upon search engines by stuffing the particular information with too many key phrases is a thing of the particular past. This should become a essential part of any local SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION checklists, as reviews and rankings could make it easier to stand out in search engine results. Research Engine Optimization, or SEO, ought to rank in as one associated with the biggest part of your own finances for online advertising. SEO or even Search Engine Optimisation is the particular name given to activity that will attempts to improve search motor rankings. Search engine marketing You Should Experience SEO 2019 At Least Once In Your Lifetime And Here's Why (SEO) is the procedure regarding affecting the visibility of the website or a web web page in a web search engine's unpaid results—often referred to since " natural ", " natural ", or "earned" results. Regional SEO utilizes a variety associated with strategies — getting your web site ranked on search engines such as Google, business directories such because Yelp, Superpages, Foursquare, Yellowbook, Search engines My Business listing, Bing Areas for Business page, localized content material on your website, online testimonials and other strategies. We frequently compose in-depth analyses on the method SEO and digital marketing will be used to boost the traffic in order to various websites. Dave Gregory, Content Marketing Supervisor from the UK based overall performance marketing agency, SiteVisibility, predicts that will 2019, and not 2018, is definitely going to be the true year of voice. If we consider Google's Guide then there are almost 200+ factors that lead a internet site in ranking, which we possess researched and clustered in twenty one On Page SEO Factors, that will needs your attention in 2019. SEO Wise Links can automatically link essential terms in your posts plus comments with corresponding posts, webpages, categories and tags on your own blog. 41. An effective cultural media strategy needs a strong SEO plan. Google does make a few of this data obtainable in their particular free Webmaster Tools interface (if you haven't set up a free account, this is a very beneficial SEO tool both for unearthing search query data and with regard to diagnosing various technical SEO issues). AI and Tone of voice Search Impact SEO, Lets notice how voice search analytics Impact's SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and can impact in the particular coming time. A great many businesses make a decision to hire external help to be able to get the full benefits involving SEO, so a large component of our audience is understanding how to convince their customers that search is a superb investment (and then prove it! ). Nevertheless, SEOs tend in order to prefer links higher on the page. Because your site, thanks to the nature of the business is going to always be more image orientated than written text heavy, you can be at a minor disadvantage when it comes for you to employing SEO techniques such since keywords, backlinking and so up. Here's a true statement you don't need to hear as often: Your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION technique for 2018 shouldn't concentrate on keywords. (1888PressRelease) Stone Marketing, a Boston-based, full-service SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and search engine marketing techniques firm today announces they have been rated as the number five SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION firm in the 2010 Advertising World Top ten SEO Business Award initiative. According to Forrester Analysis, the number of global mobile phone subscribers is expected to achieve 3. 5 billion by 2019, crossing the 50% mark regarding smartphone penetration by 2018, plus reaching 59% by 2019. On-page SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION ensures that your site can be read by both possible customers and search engine programs. In 2019, voice-search will end up being the dominant way that individuals search. But SEO is all regarding the organic” rankings, which show up in the middle of the particular search results page. The most important SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION factor for creating high-quality content material is doing good keyword study. Formula changes in 2018 seem in order to centre on reducing the effectiveness of old-school SEO techniques, along with the May 2015 Google ‘Quality' protocol update bruisingly familiar. Keep in mind in SEO article writing recommendations you keywords have to create sense too. Domain Authority within SEO is a rank that will measures how popular and reliable search engines call at your own website. If the key phrases you might be hoping to rank with regard to don't show on the page, this will be much more difficult to achieve your goals -- making on-page optimization a essential part of most SEO promotions. It looks frequently used in SEO as the general definition for the method that the mathematical detection associated with synonyms, and how certain phrases are related to others inside a piece of text, is used to the indexing of web pages by search engines like search engines. So if you would become to write 5% for every keyword then your word SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and Article will be within the content 75 times every. Like any good SEO company before concentrating on the details will do a proper hyperlink edit and fix all the particular error pages. Taking the hard work to comprehend even the fundamentals of SEO can help your own site gain higher click-through prices, engagement, and of course, ratings. Kent Lewis, President and Founder of the particular Portland based performance firm, Anvil, predicts that both Amazon research and voice search will end up being trends in 2019. MarketingVox warns towards getting tied to a "link farm" whose bad SEO practices could bring you down. Your web webpages must earn that high rank with high-quality content and best-practice SEO. Content is the 2nd major SEO ranking factor, plus is just as important since links. Previously known since WordPress SEO by Yoast, Yoast SEO is one of the particular most quintessential WordPress plugins whenever it comes to search motor optimization. While SEOs need in order to understand it is not just about rankings, UX specialists require to admit that user knowledge kicks in even before making use of the website. You will find on-site and off site SEO techniques that you may use to higher your research engine ranking. SEO specialists started in order to abuse PageRank in order in order to boost the rankings. Now could be a great time to take a nearer take a look at SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION marketing information because search is getting even worse for many types of B2B plus B2C businesses. SEO marketers plus writers typically come up along with different kinds of content in order to place the necessary keywords within. These are some of the particular most used types, and every one helps to lead to the level of variety in conditions of website content. Certain black hat SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION techniques, such as keyword filling, are thought to be the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION equivalent of spamming, and lookup engines will penalize them. Internet marketing is exclusively driven by SEO or research engine optimization. Others are usually simply traditional PR firms that have learned SEO as properly as the value of hyperlinks. Here's a cliche among electronic marketers: Search engine optimization (SEO) isn't what used to become. Google announced that will they released several minor enhancements over the period of the particular time of about a 7 days and after analysis, experts inside the SEO industry concluded that will the updates were the outcome of keyword permutations and web site using doorway pages. SEO, or Search Motor Optimization, means setting up your own website and content to show up through online search results. People who else want to take their company to some new height plus generally and mostly believe within the way of SEO advertising. Because it turns out, there's more in order to on-page SEO than optimizing with regard to keywords. Search engines motor optimization (organic SEO) describes the particular methods used to obtain the high placement (or ranking) upon a search engine results web page in unpaid, algorithm-driven results upon the given search engine. Also, videos possess a lot of untapped prospective - great for SEO and even make for good user wedding. The really best SEO expert 2019 may tell you for High-End mobile devices, we're seeing more format changes to focus, provide the better experience, search results. Social SEO is especially helpful for online reputation administration. It isn't just the method that Google ranks optimized articles, but the way that that they rank poorly constructed or taboo content that will push the ranking to where it really should to be in 2019. Ray Cheselka, SEO & Ppc Manager at SEO and style agency, webFEAT Complete, predicts that will sites with over a 2 second load time will end up being penalized, and search intent is definitely going to still grow within importance. SEO consists of ordering the site's architecture and hyperlinks to make pages inside the particular website easier to find plus navigate. In contrast, articles that no one is humming about have minimal effect upon social SEO. They are usually generally knowledgeable within the are usually of both SEO and content material marketing. When it arrives to reviews, customers work as a good army of link builders plus keyword writers so your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION structure is shaped without a person having to lift a hand. Keyword studies about locating those terms so that a person can use them properly within content optimization and SEO within general. Just as content on your own isn't enough to guarantee SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION success, SEO alone isn't good enough to ensure that people will certainly find and engage with your own articles. While intense SEO may involve complex site restructuring along with a firm (or consultant) that will specializes in this area, generally there are a few simple ways you can take yourself in order to raise your search engine ranking. While we prepare to enter 2019, keyword creation for SEO professionals will become less important. Obtain the training you need in order to stay ahead with expert-led classes on Seo (SEO). Learn how to create articles, learn how to compose some simple HTML, and the particular learn the very basic concepts of SEO, and you may make money online using SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and article marketing to obtain your website (you only require one from each website) shown on Page #1 of Search engines (forget Yahoo as well since the rest) and you can get loads of visitors that will web page. If your website will be made up of lower-quality entrance type pages using old SEO-techniques (which more and more branded as spam in 2018) after that Google will not index just about all of the pages as properly as your website ‘quality score' is probably likely to become negatively impacted. This particular is beyond website content, but great user experience has become a lot more and more important in solid SEO rankings.

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rollinbrigittenv8 · 7 years ago

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New Expedia CEO Just Became His Own Guy in Outlining a New Strategy

Expedia CEO Mark Okerstrom made is first public appearance as CEO at the Skift Global Forum in New York City September 27, 2017. He's started to set a course for Expedia that is somewhat different than his predecessor's. Skift

Skift Take: It should be no surprise that the new Expedia CEO, who Barry Diller claims to have selected without conducting a wider candidate search, would have his own ideas about where to take the $22 billion company. Okerstrom is even talking about a path for Expedia becoming number one in online travel. That's definitely something we haven't heard publicly articulated in awhile.

— Dennis Schaal

Now that Expedia Inc. CEO Mark Okerstrom has settled into his new job, after predecessor Dara Khosrowshahi high-tailed it off for Uber nearly two months ago, a lot of Okerstrom’s initial talk about not having a list of things he’d want to do differently than the former CEO has been cast aside.

In presiding over his first earnings call Thursday as Expedia’s number two honcho — after controlling shareholder and chairperson Barry Diller, that is — CEO Okerstrom said in the future Expedia would “disproportionately” seek to create value from the organic growth of its existing businesses, including Expedia, Hotels.com, and HomeAway, for example.

That represents a sea change from Expedia’s strategy as Khosrowshahi, with then-CFO Okerstrom very much involved at every juncture, executed a blockbuster series of acquisitions in 2014 and 2015, including buying Travelocity, Wotif, Auto Escape Group, Orbitz Worldwide, HomeAway, and more.

Okerstrom said Expedia would still be open to acquisitions when attractive opportunities arose, but clearly he’s looking to emphasize expansion generated from the company’s portfolio of existing businesses rather than from newly seized prizes.

That pivot comes after Expedia bought Orbitz Worldwide for $1.6 billion in 2015, but got bogged down in the difficulties of integrating it into Expedia’s family of brands and onto the Expedia technology platform.

During Expedia’s 2014-2015 acquisition spree, Priceline Group officials and others contended that Expedia’s acquisition strategy would turn out to be problematic, and in the short term, at least, that arguably has turned out to be true. The Priceline Group, which is growing much faster than Expedia on an organic basis, had its own acquisition woes, however, having had to take a $941 million impairment charge on its $2.6 billion acquisition of dining reservations site OpenTable in 2014.

Okerstrom’s Divergent Strategy

In his opening remarks for analysts during Expedia’s third quarter earnings call, Okerstrom also said Expedia’s new marching orders would be: Become locally relevant on a global basis rather than 2017’s “go global” mantra under Khosrowshahi. Among the nuanced differences would be emphasizing the build-up of local lodging supply, improving language translation, and ramping up tech and marketing investments in local markets.

How do we get to be number one in online travel?” Okerstrom asked rhetorically. “We know what to do,” he said, adding “it’s more going deep as opposed to going wide,” and investing in more compelling consumer experiences.

Okestrom also said he wants to put the “A back into OTAs,” meaning emphasizing the travel agent and customer service aspect of the online travel agency label.

Expedia’s new CEO said the company plans to make a greater effort to set priorities and accelerating its execution, both of which would help take Expedia to a “different level.”

Along those lines, Okerstrom said Expedia would spend more on marketing, technology and on-boarding new lodging properties for the rest of this year and 2018.

Alan Pickerill, who became Expedia’s new CFO in September when Okerstrom transitioned from that post to CEO, said accelerating the number of properties available on Expedia Inc. sites would produce “outsized returns.”

Expedia now has 500,000 hotels, vacation rentals and apartments available on its platform, the company said, and that is a 57 percent jump over the third quarter of 2016.

A Weak Third Quarter

For all the talk about tweaked strategies, Expedia Inc. had a disappointing quarter as results were dragged down by an $8 million loss and outsized marketing spend at its Trivago hotel-search unit; a $15 million to $20 million profit hit from hurricanes and earthquakes, as well as ramped up marketing spend and increased technology costs at HomeAway, which now boasts 1.5 million online bookable listings.

For the quarter, Expedia’s profits rose 25.2 percent to $349.3 million on revenue of $2.96 billion, a 15 percent jump. The revenue figure was below analysts’ expectations.

Okerstrom said “our overall results were weaker than expected,” and he cited the “record storms.” Room night growth in the quarter, which includes HomeAway, was sluggish at 16 percent compared to 31 percent in the third quarter of 2016.

Trivago Will Take Time to get its mojo back

A year ago, Expedia officials were pointing to their Trivago hotel-search and HomeAway vacation rental brands as keys to future growth, and they still make these arguments.

However, Trivago encountered a speed bump as it reorganized its auctions for online travel agency and hotel advertisers earlier this year, and now envisions depressed results through next year.

That’s a remarkable turn of events for Trivago, which executed an IPO late last year, and had been binging on growth.

Expedia officials said advertisers are testing the new Trivago bidding platform, and are making adjustments to get at efficiencies for their companies.

Expedia CFO Pickerill said Trivago’s performance will be negatively impacted as advertisers adjust to “the new normal.”

But Okerstrom emphasized that Expedia still believes Trivago has an “excellent” business and consumer product, which is run by “excellent operators.”

“I think that it will take a little bit of time,” Okestrom said, adding that “we do believe that it’s going to settle out.”

HomeAway Won’t Make Its Profit Goal in 2018

Pickerill said HomeAway will not meet the $350 million profit goal that officials had previously announced for 2018 in part because of increased costs in transitioning to cloud computing, and because of heightened marketing spend. Officials didn’t articulate a new goal.

HomeAway is now positioned to execute more efficiently and “step it up” because it has made strides in transitioning from a subscription- to a transaction-based business, Okerstrom said. In fact, in the third quarter, 75 percent of HomeAway’s revenue came from homeowners paying per bookings instead of the previous norm of paying flat subscription fees regardless of whether a transaction occurred.

Asked whether HomeAway would soon make a big push into urban areas, which is Aibnb’s strength and a departure from HomeAway’s resort- and ski-area base, Okerstrom said HomeAway would prioritize marketing those 1.5 million online bookable listings that it boasts.

Perhaps HomeAway would begin an urban initiative in late 2018, Okerstrom said.

After all, it’s all about revamped priorities all around under a new regime.

0 notes

touristguidebuzz · 7 years ago

Text

New Expedia CEO Just Became His Own Guy in Outlining a New Strategy

— Dennis Schaal

Okerstrom’s Divergent Strategy

Okestrom also said he wants to put the “A back into OTAs,” meaning emphasizing the travel agent and customer service aspect of the online travel agency label.

Expedia’s new CEO said the company plans to make a greater effort to set priorities and accelerating its execution, both of which would help take Expedia to a “different level.”

Along those lines, Okerstrom said Expedia would spend more on marketing, technology and on-boarding new lodging properties for the rest of this year and 2018.

Expedia now has 500,000 hotels, vacation rentals and apartments available on its platform, the company said, and that is a 57 percent jump over the third quarter of 2016.

A Weak Third Quarter

For the quarter, Expedia’s profits rose 25.2 percent to $349.3 million on revenue of $2.96 billion, a 15 percent jump. The revenue figure was below analysts’ expectations.

Trivago Will Take Time to get its mojo back

A year ago, Expedia officials were pointing to their Trivago hotel-search and HomeAway vacation rental brands as keys to future growth, and they still make these arguments.

However, Trivago encountered a speed bump as it reorganized its auctions for online travel agency and hotel advertisers earlier this year, and now envisions depressed results through next year.

That’s a remarkable turn of events for Trivago, which executed an IPO late last year, and had been binging on growth.

Expedia officials said advertisers are testing the new Trivago bidding platform, and are making adjustments to get at efficiencies for their companies.

Expedia CFO Pickerill said Trivago’s performance will be negatively impacted as advertisers adjust to “the new normal.”

But Okerstrom emphasized that Expedia still believes Trivago has an “excellent” business and consumer product, which is run by “excellent operators.”

“I think that it will take a little bit of time,” Okestrom said, adding that “we do believe that it’s going to settle out.”

HomeAway Won’t Make Its Profit Goal in 2018

Perhaps HomeAway would begin an urban initiative in late 2018, Okerstrom said.

After all, it’s all about revamped priorities all around under a new regime.

0 notes

cryptoga-blog · 7 years ago

Text

Making Sense of Cryptoeconomics - CoinDesk

http://www.cryptoga.com/news/making-sense-of-cryptoeconomics-coindesk/

Making Sense of Cryptoeconomics - CoinDesk

Josh Stark (@0xstark) is a member of Ledger Labs and Blockgeeks Lab, a blockchain co-creation company in Toronto, Canada.

In this CoinDesk opinion piece, Stark argues that the term “cryptoeconomics” is widely misunderstood, despite being a crucial concept needed to understand and analyze the blockchain industry.

A few months ago Parker Thompson, a well known Silicon Valley VC, tweeted that “the concept of crypto-economics is stupid. It’s economics. Inventing your own word is just an excuse to ignore well-understood concepts.”

The term “cryptoeconomics” causes a lot of confusion and people are often unclear on what it is supposed to mean. The word itself can be misleading, as it suggests that there is a parallel “crypto” version of the whole of economics. This is wrong, and Parker is right to mock such a generalization.

In simple terms, cryptoeconomics is the use of incentives and cryptography to design new kinds of systems, applications, and networks. Cryptoeconomics is specifically about building things, and has most in common with mechanism design – an area of mathematics and economic theory.

Cryptoeconomics is not a subfield of economics, but rather an area of applied cryptography that takes economic incentives and economic theory into account. Bitcoin, ethereum, zcash and all other public blockchains are products of cryptoeconomics.

Cryptoeconomics is what makes blockchains interesting, what makes them different from other technologies. As a result of Satoshi’s white paper, we have learned that through the clever combination of cryptography, networking theory, computer science and economic incentives that we can build new kinds of technologies. These new cryptoeconomic systems can accomplish things that these disciplines could not achieve on their own. Blockchains are just one product of this new practical science.

This article aims to explain cryptoeconomics in clear, simple terms. First, we examine bitcoin as an example of cryptoeconomic design. Second, we consider how cryptoeconomics relates to economic theory in general. Third, we look at three different areas of cryptoeconomic design and research that are active today.

1. What is cryptoeconomics? Bitcoin as a case study

Bitcoin is a product of cryptoeconomics.

Bitcoin’s innovation is that it allows many entities who do not know one another to reliably reach consensus about the state of the bitcoin blockchain. This is achieved using a combination of economic incentives and basic cryptographic tools.

Bitcoin’s design relies on economic incentives and penalties. Economic rewards are used to enlist miners to support the network. Miners contribute their hardware and electricity because if they produce new blocks, they are rewarded with amounts of bitcoin.

Second, economic costs or penalties are part of bitcoin’s security model. The most obvious way to attack the bitcoin blockchain would be to gain control of a majority of the network’s hashing power – a so-called 51 percent attack – which would let an attacker reliably censor transactions and even change the past state of the blockchain.

But gaining control of hashing power costs money, in the form of hardware and electricity. Bitcoin’s protocol intentionally makes mining difficult, meaning that gaining control of a majority of the network is extremely expensive – enough that it would be hard to profit from the attack. As of August 16, 2017, the cost of a 51 percent attack on bitcoin would be around $1.88 billion in hardware and $3.4 million in electricity every day.

Without these carefully calibrated economic incentives, bitcoin wouldn’t work. If mining did not come with a high cost, it would be easy to launch a 51 percent attack. If there were no mining reward, there would be no industry of people who buy hardware and pay for electricity to contribute to the network.

Bitcoin also relies on cryptographic protocols. Public-private key cryptography is used to give individuals safe, exclusive control of their bitcoin. Hash functions are used to “link” each block in the bitcoin blockchain, proving an order of events and the integrity of past data.

Cryptographic protocols like these give us the basic tools necessary to build reliable, secure systems like Bitcoin. Without something like public-private key infrastructure, we could not guarantee to a user that they have exclusive control over their bitcoin. Without something like hashing functions, nodes would not be able to guarantee the integrity of the history of bitcoin transactions contained in Bitcoin’s blockchain.

Without the hardness of cryptographic protocols like hashing functions or public-private key cryptography, we would have no secure unit of account with which to reward miners – no confidence that our record of past accounts was authentic and exclusively controlled by a rightful owner. Without a carefully calibrated set of incentives to reward an industry of miners, that unit of account could have no market value because there would be no confidence that the system could persist into the future.

In this way, bitcoin’s design requires an understanding of both cryptography and how incentives affect the security properties and functionality of systems built with cryptography. Cryptoeconomics is strange and counterintuitive. Most of us are not used to thinking of money as a design or engineering problem, nor are we used to economic incentive design being an essential component of a new technology. Cryptoeconomics requires us to think about information security problems in economic terms.

One of the most common mistakes in this industry is made by those who view blockchains only through a lens of computer science or applied cryptography. We have a strong tendency to prioritize the things we are most comfortable with, and see things outside of our domain of expertise as less important.

In blockchain technology, this leads many people to assume or abstract away the crucial role of economic incentives. This is one reason we see meaningless phrases like “blockchains are trustless,” “bitcoin is backed only by math“ or “blockchains are immutable.” These are all wrong in their own way, but all have the effect of obfuscating the essential role of a large network of people whose necessary participation in the network is maintained through economic incentives.

Cryptoeconomic systems like bitcoin feel like magic to someone who views them only as a product of computer science, because bitcoin can do things that computer-science alone could never accomplish. Cryptoeconomics isn’t magic – it’s just interdisciplinary.

2. How does it relate to economics more generally?

The term cryptoeconomics can be misleading because it suggests a comparison to economics as a whole. This is part of what leads people like Parker to dismiss the term. Economics is the study of choice: how people and groups of people respond to incentives. The invention of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology does not require a new theory of human choice – the humans haven’t changed. Cryptoeconomics is not the application of macroeconomic and microeconomic theory to cryptocurrency or token markets.

Cryptoeconomics has most in common with mechanism design, a field related to game theory. In game theory, we look at a given strategic interaction (a “game”) and then try to understand the best strategies for each player, and the likely outcome if both players follow those strategies. For instance, we might use game theory to look at a negotiation between two firms, relations between countries or even evolutionary biology.

Mechanism design is often referred to as reverse game theory because we start with a desired outcome and then work backwards to design a game that, if players pursue their own self interest, will produce the outcome we want. For instance, imagine we are responsible for designing the rules of an auction. We have an objective that we want bidders to actually bid the real value they place on an item. To achieve this, we apply economic theory to design the auction as a game where the dominant strategy for any player is to always bid their true value. One solution to this problem is called a Vickrey auction, where bids are secret and the winner of the auction (defined as the player with the highest bid) only pays the second highest amount that was bid.

Cryptoeconomics, like mechanism design, focuses on designing and creating systems. Like in our auction example, we use economic theory to design “rules” or mechanisms that produce a certain equilibrium outcome. But in cryptoeconomics, the mechanisms used to create economic incentives are built using cryptography and software and the systems we are designing are almost always distributed or decentralized.

Bitcoin is a product of this approach. Satoshi wanted bitcoin to have certain properties – for instance, that it be able to reach consensus about its internal state and that it be censorship-resistant. Then, Satoshi set out to design a system that would achieve those properties, assuming people responded in rational ways to economic incentives.

Most often, cryptoeconomics is used to provide a security guarantee about a distributed system. For instance, we have a cryptoeconomic security guarantee that the bitcoin blockchain is secure against a 51 percent attack unless someone is willing to spend a few billion dollars. Or, in a state channel – a topic we discuss later – we can have a cryptoeconomic security guarantee that an off-chain process is nearly as secure and final as an on-chain transaction.

It is worth noting that mechanism design is not a panacea. There is a limit to how much we can rely on incentives to predictably shape future behaviour. As Nick Szabo rightly points out, ultimately we are speculating about people’s future mental states and making assumptions about how they react to certain incentives. A cryptoeconomic system’s security guarantee depends in part on the strength of its assumptions about how people react to economic incentives.

Three examples of cryptoeconomics

There are at least three different kinds of systems being designed today that could be called “cryptoeconomic”.

Example 1: Consensus protocols

Blockchains are able to reach reliable consensus without having to rely on a central trusted party – a product of cryptoeconomic design. Bitcoin’s solution, which we surveyed above, is called “proof-of-work” consensus because miners must commit work – in the form of hardware and electricity – in order to be participate in the network and receive mining rewards.

Improving proof-of-work systems and designing alternatives to them is one active area of cryptoeconomic research and design. Ethereum’s current proof-of-work consensus mechanism includes many variations and improvements on the original design, enabling faster block times and being more resistant to the mining centralization that can result from ASICs.

In the near future, ethereum plans to migrate to a “proof-of-stake” consensus protocol called Casper. This is an alternative to proof-of-work that does not require “mining” in the usual sense: there is no need for specialized mining hardware or huge expenditures of electricity.

Remember that the whole point of requiring miners to buy hardware and spend electricity is to impose a cost on miners, as a way of raising the cumulative cost of attempting a 51 percent attack sufficiently high that it becomes too expensive. The idea behind proof-of-stake systems is to use deposits of cryptocurrency to create the same disincentive, rather than real-world investments like hardware and electricity.

In order to mine in a proof-of-stake system, you must commit a certain amount of ether into a smart contract “bond.” Just like in proof-of-work, this raises the cost of a 51 percent attack – an attacker would have to commit a very large amount of ether to successfully attack the network, which they would then lose forever.

Casper is being designed by Vlad Zamfir, Vitalik Buterin, and others at the Ethereum Foundation. You can read more about the history of Casper’s design in this series of posts by Zamfir or hear him talk about it on a recent podcast. Buterin wrote a long post about Casper’s design philosophy here, and there is a useful FAQ on the ethereum GitHub wiki here.

Example 2: Cryptoeconomic application design

Once we have solved the fundamental problem of blockchain consensus, we are able to build applications that sit “on top” of a blockchain like ethereum. The underlying blockchain gives us (1) a unit of value that can be used to create incentives and penalties, and (2) a toolkit with which we can design conditional logic in the form of “smart contract code.” The applications we build with these tools can also be a product of cryptoeconomic design.

For instance, the prediction market Augur requires cryptoeconomic mechanisms in order to function. Using its native token REP, Augur creates a system of incentives that rewards users for reporting the “truth” to the application, which is then used to settle bets in the prediction market. This is the innovation that makes a decentralized prediction market possible. Another prediction market, Gnosis, uses a similar method, though also lets users specify other mechanisms for determining true outcomes (commonly called “oracles”).

Cryptoeconomics is also applied to design token sales or ICOs. Gnosis, for instance, used a “Dutch auction” as a model for its token auction, on the theory that this would result in a more fair distribution (an experiment that had mixed results). We mentioned earlier that one area where mechanism design has been applied is in the design of auctions, and token sales gives us a new opportunity to apply some of that theory.

These are a different kind of problem than building the underlying consensus protocols, but they share enough similarities that both can be fairly seen as cryptoeconomic. Building these applications requires an understanding of how incentives shape users’ behaviour and careful design of economic mechanisms that can reliably produce a certain result. They also require an understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the underlying blockchain on which the application is built.

Many blockchain applications are not products of cryptoeconomics; for instance, applications like Status and Metamask – wallets or platforms that let users interact with the ethereum blockchain. These do not involve any additional cryptoeconomic mechanisms beyond those that are already part of the underlying blockchain.

Example 3: State channels

Cryptoeconomics also includes the practice of designing much smaller sets of interactions between individuals. The most notable of these are state channels. State channels are not an application but a valuable technique that can be used by most blockchain applications to become more efficient.

A fundamental limitation of blockchain applications is that blockchains are expensive. Sending transactions requires fees, and using ethereum to run smart-contract code is comparatively costly to other kinds of computation. The idea behind state channels is that we can make blockchains more efficient by moving many processes off-chain, while still retaining a blockchain’s characteristic trustworthiness, through the use of cryptoeconomic design.

Imagine Alice and Bob want to exchange a large number of small payments of cryptocurrency. The normal way for them to do this would be to send transactions to the blockchain. This is inefficient – it requires paying transaction fees and waiting for the confirmation of new blocks.

Instead, imagine that Alice and Bob sign transactions that could be submitted to the blockchain, but are not. They pass these back and forth between one another, as fast as they want – there are no fees, because nothing is actually hitting the blockchain yet. Each update “trumps” the last one, updating the balance between the parties.

When Alice and Bob have finished exchanging small payments, they “close out” the channel by submitting the final state (i.e. the most recent signed transaction) to the blockchain, paying only a single transaction fee for an unlimited number of transactions between themselves. They can trust this process because both Alice and Bob know that each update passed between them could be sent to the blockchain. If the channel is properly designed, there is no way to cheat – say, by trying to submit a previous update as though it were the most recent – since recourse to the blockchain is always available.

For illustrative purposes, you can think of this as similar to how we interact with other trusted sources, like a legal system. When two parties sign a contract, most of the time they never need to take that contract to court and ask a judge to interpret and enforce it. If the contract is properly designed, both parties simply do what they promised to do, and never interact with the courts at all. The fact that either party could go to the court and have the contract enforced is enough to make the contract useful.

This technique is not just useful for payments, but for any update to the state of an ethereum program – hence the more general term “state channel” rather than the narrow “payment channel.” Instead of sending payments back and forth, we can send updates to a smart contract back and forth. We can even send entire ethereum smart contracts that, if needed, will be sent to the blockchain and executed. These programs never have to be executed to be useful. All that is needed is a sufficiently high guarantee that they could be executed if necessary.

In the future, most blockchain applications will use state channels in some form. It is almost always a strict improvement to require less on-chain operation, and many things done on-chain today can be moved into state channels while still preserving a sufficiently high guarantee to be useful.

The description above skips over many important details and nuances of how state channels work. For a more detailed description, Ledger Labs built a toy implementation last summer that demonstrates the basic concept.

Conclusion

Thinking about the blockchain space through the lens of cryptoeconomics is helpful. Once you understand the idea, it helps to clarify many of the controversies and debates in our industry.

For instance, “permissioned” blockchains that are centrally managed and do not use proof-of-work have been a source of constant controversy since they were first proposed. This area of work is often referred to as “distributed ledger technology” and is focused on financial and enterprise use cases. Many partisans of blockchain technology dislike them – they may be blockchains in the literal sense, but there is something about them that feels wrong. They seem to reject the thing that many people see as the whole point of blockchain technology: being able to produce consensus without relying on a central party or traditional financial systems.

A cleaner way to make this distinction is between blockchains that are products of cryptoeconomics and blockchains that are not. Blockchains that are simply distributed ledgers and do not rely on cryptoeconomic design to produce consensus or align incentives might be useful for some applications. But they are distinct from blockchains whose whole purpose is to use cryptography and economic incentives to produce consensus that could not exist before, like bitcoin and ethereum. These are two different technologies, and the clearest way of distinguishing between them is whether or not they are products of cryptoeconomics.

Secondly, we should expect that there will be cryptoeconomic consensus protocols that do not rely on a literal chain of blocks. Obviously, such a technology would have something in common with blockchain technology as we call it today, but labelling them blockchains would be inaccurate. Again, the relevant organizing concept is whether such a protocol is the product of cryptoeconomics, not whether it is a blockchain.

The ICO craze has also focused attention on this distinction, though few have articulated it clearly. Many people independently identified that one of the strongest signs of a token’s value is whether it forms a necessary component of the application to which it is connected. To put this in clearer terms, the question should be: is the token part of a necessary cryptoeconomic mechanism in the application? Understanding the mechanism design of a project holding an ICO is an essential tool in determining that token’s utility and likely value.

In the past years, we’ve moved from thinking about this new field solely through the lens of one application (bitcoin), to thinking about it in terms of one underlying technology (blockchains). What needs to happen now is to step back once again and view this industry in terms of a unifying approach to solving problems: cryptoeconomics.

Thanks to Jeff Coleman, Ethan Wilding, and Vlad Zamfir for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Disclosure: CoinDesk is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which has an ownership stake in Zerocoin Electric Coin Company, developer of zcash.

Understanding economics image via Shutterstock

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk strives to offer an open platform for dialogue and discussion on all things blockchain by encouraging contributed articles. As such, the opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the view of CoinDesk.

For more details on how you can submit an opinion or analysis article, view our Editorial Collaboration Guide or email [email protected].

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