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savingoursanity · 3 years ago

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Hi. I was wondering, is it possible to not have a coping mechanism? 🤔 I had to go to therapy because I felt too stressed and anxious all the time (unfortunetly I had to quit it) and the psychiatrist told me to find coping mechanisms for myself. I also told her that I don't seem to be really good at un-stressing myself, although she seemed like I will find it for sure.... Well I didn't. It's been about 6 months and no matter what I do I never let go of that stress, nor do I relax. I mean I can't relax when I have that tiny "episode" of being stressed, bc ofc it's not like I actually never relax.

Do you maybe know why I can't find any healthy coping mechanism? Only distraction works for me, like watching movies, social media, but the psychiatrist told me it's not so healthy to depend on distraction. I really tried, I was meditating, going on long walks, exercising, writing a journal-at some point even poetry, cleaning, changing my diet, drawing, sleeping, riding my bike, cooking, to be honest I don't think there are things I didn't try to do. And it's annoying because even if I do cardio for an hour I still think about that one thing which stressed me out or I get distracted while writing/drawing and circle back to being anxious. Even if sometimes I actually get a little bit relieved, it never really works for a long time.

I hope you don't get too worked up with these asks because it seems like you get them pretty often haha. You have a really kind heart. ❤️

Once again thank you so much for trusting me with this ask! I have loved getting these so much they have been a bright point in my life during these bleak times.

Although I will be completely honest this ask has been sitting in my drafts for months (I'm so sorry). I'm not going to try and find any excuse for myself so lets just right into things.

I've been toying around with how best to answer this ask because there are so many ways I could go about it. I could go on and on about coping mechanisms as a concept as well as other related concepts because I'm such a nerd about this stuff. However I know for a fact that would wind up becoming a very long and dense post (worse than what this one currently is *cough cough*) and I want to avoid overwhelming you with more technical information.

So I'm going to try and answer this as clearly and directly as possible. There were certain parts of what you've said that stuck out to me that I'd like to explore a bit more.

To begin with, I think we have a collective misunderstanding of what it means to relax and let go of stress. People will experience stress and anxiety in many ways and because of that there's equally as many if not more ways of coping and dealing with it.

Stress can express itself in three main ways: through thoughts, emotions and physical sensations (i.e. fatigue, tension, pain, intestinal discomfort, etc.). The way you experience stress and anxiety may very well involve all three to a certain degree. This is why it's important to learn to know yourself to be able to understand how you specifically experience anxiety at baseline or how you react to stressful situations. It's by getting to know yourself better that you'll be able to next be able to explore just how to find coping strategies that are more appropriate for you. Which brings me to my next point.

You've mentioned that distraction is what you have found to work. Distractions can take many forms, and I get the feeling that's why you may have hit a roadblock. You see, the types of things you've tried can still act as distractions depending on how you do them or use them.

Now we give a lot of flack to distraction because often it's another term for avoidance or repression. But sometimes we really do need to take a step back and remove ourselves long enough to come back and deal with the issue with a clearer more collected mind. For more physical and sensory aspects of anxiety, the activities you've mentioned can help to reduce the stress activation in the brain to a level that is more tolerable. Our mistake is that we use these distractions and stop there, which is why they appear to not work very well or for very long.

This is where I have a bit of a bone to pick with the whole self-care™ mentality we have nowadays. Yes it's important to take care of ourselves and our bodies, but it only goes so far for dealing with the emotional and thought aspects of stress and anxiety.

You've said it yourself, no matter what you do those anxious thoughts and feelings are there to greet you once again the second you stop the activity or even while you're doing it. If I can reassure you in any way, it's not exactly surprising that these things haven't been working for you and it's not because you haven't tried hard enough for that matter.

Honestly it makes sense that you haven't found those things helpful, because that's not where your problem actually is. I myself have long struggled with excessive anxiety and all those types of activities can be great in terms of trying to find a little oasis of relief, but unless they actually help you better face reality afterwards then it somewhat defeats the purpose.

If you want my actual honest opinion about why you haven't found a 'healthy coping mechanism', it's because you haven't been directly addressing what's been bothering you enough. That and you may be hoping to find 'THE' fix that will work, but when it comes to chronic anxiety there is no quick and easy fix. These are tough pills to swallow I know, but unfortunately there isn't exactly any way to go around it. You can't fix a broken arm with a band-aid after all.

That being said, I'm fully aware that addressing anxiety problems is much easier said than done. Helping yourself deal with an issue you are the cause of and are still creating is a very weird battle to be fighting make no mistake about it. But that doesn't mean it's impossible.

It starts with little things that you can try to put in place and every baby step counts. Be willing to be kind with yourself, to respect your pace no matter how infuriatingly slow it may be. The process of growth is not something that you can fast track, believe me I've tried.

Now knowing where to begin working on your anxious thoughts is different for each person, but I want to offer some suggestions that might hopefully help give you a bit of direction.

For me personally one thing that has really helped in my journey of dealing with anxiety has been learning to accept that I have anxiety. That may sound obvious and straightforward but it weirdly enough it often isn't. You see a lot of us deal with what I call anxiety² aka "stressed about being stressed". We're all guilty of it to some level either because of family or social expectations or because of the way we perceive and interpret these expectations.

However feeling or being made to feel bad or ashamed for being anxious has helped literally no one ever. You just wind up spiraling even faster than you already were. Going from anxiety² to plain ol anxiety is, in my humble opinion, a first step that needs to take place before anything else can really happen.

It starts by trying to just be able to accept your anxiety for what it is, not as something wrong, bad, shameful, etc. but as something that is plainly and simply a part of you. You may be surprised at how much better you feel by being able to do that.

My other suggestion is to try to find ways to externalize those thoughts and feelings. Because in a way anxiety actually is "all in your head", it's not by staying in your head that you're going to find a way out. This is where some of the activities you mentioned in your ask can be used, but perhaps in a more constructive way. It's all about mindset and intention so not so much the 'what' but the 'how' and 'why'. Instead of trying to "achieve zen" or something equally ridiculous, channel your anxiety into what you're doing. Creative outlets are great for that, so writing, drawing, music, etc., as a way to get what's bothering you out of your system. The same can be done with exercise and any other activity too if you use a little bit of imagination. Find whatever works for you that allows you to get out of your head.

One last thing I will suggest is try not to do it all on your own. All the activities you mentioned can work well and maybe even quite well, however, we can't overlook the impact of talking out our issues. See, because of how anxiety as a psychological construct works in our brains, for most of us trying to work at it on our own will have limited effectiveness. That's not to say that all the things mentioned before aren't worth doing because they definitely are and talking about anxiety is scary and hard after all. If for now you can only handle the things you can do yourself then that's totally okay. I'm also very aware that not everyone has the greatest support system and that talking it out with those around us might actually cause more problems in the end.

That being said, if you can, try to find people you can talk to about what you are thinking and feeling. You don't have to open up about everything or try to find solutions for your problems either for that matter. Again, talking it out is mainly and mostly having another another way to externalize what you are experiencing.

Once again thank you so much for this ask and I wish you the best of luck in finding ways to manage the beast that is anxiety. As always my dm's and asks are open to anyone who has any questions about mental health or anything else they feel like talking about. Take care and I love you all <3

#asks #mental health #anxiety #stress #coping mechanism #self care #savingoursanity

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hydrus · 6 years ago

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Version 341

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source

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I had a great week after being ill at the end of the previous week. There is a bit more than usual in this release because of the extra time. The Client API has some new commands, and there are a variety of fixes and stability improvements.

client api

The Client API now does some fun stuff. If you would like to play with one user's browser extension, which recognises hydrus-compatible URLs--including whether you have the page's file already--and lets you send them straight to hydrus for downloading, please check it out here:

https://gitgud.io/prkc/hydrus-companion

And the Client API help itself is here:

https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/help/client_api.html

There is a little info at the top telling you how to turn the API on.

This release brings some more API commands. You can now edit a file's tags, edit a file's URLs, and the 'add_url' command now lets you attach tags for any files coming from the given URL and also lets you determine which page (by page name) the URL will go to (for instance if you have multiple watcher pages working on different check timings for different boards).

the rest

I spent some time this week cleaning things up. Repository update processing uses less memory and now regularly saves its progress on big jobs, reducing transaction bloat, improving error recovery, and giving control back to you much faster when it finishes. Memory use all around should be reduced.

I also replaced several areas of messy UI code, which has resulted in improved stability, particularly for Linux. Some CRITICAL logspam is gone, and I believe I have finally fixed a lingering ui crash on the duplicates processing page (at least for search distance 0--I will still work on >0, which seems to be a db-level problem for linux). Several boot crashes due to incorrect boot-error handling (such as when catching that some client_files directories are missing) are also fixed. I would appreciate your continued feedback here.

Duplicate processing now treats ratings copy/move/merge actions a little different: Before, it would only make a change if the 'destination' file had no rating set--now it will do it if it has no rating or if the rating is smaller than what the 'source' has. For instance, merging two files that have rating 2/5 and 3/5 will result in both files having rating 3/5.

After talking with a user about different ways of storing and presenting thumbnails, I put some work into a thumbnail drawing experiment that only needs one set of thumbs to draw on screen (the current thumbnail system stores two copies for different purposes). If you would like to try it temporarily, please turn it on under help->debug->gui actions->thumbnail experiment mode. Instead of using your 'resized' thumbs, it will only use the 'master'. It makes no changes to your file structure, and you can turn it off at any time. Try loading up some random files in your client and let me know if you get any errors or if any thumbs take an extremely long time to load. I've wanted to drop the two-thumb storage system for some time but never had good numbers to feel good about it, but my tests here are promising--the experiment mode only takes a few hundred µs more per initial thumb load for me, and if I were to switch over to it permanently, I could reduce it even further. Assuming there are no big problems here, I expect to chip away at this problem over the coming weeks and hopefully make a significant simplification in hydrus file storage.

full list

client api:

added /add_tags/add_tags, which does several kinds of tag content updates

added /add_tags/clean_tags, which shows how hydrus will handle potential tags

added /add_urls/associate_url, which allows you to associate urls with files

added 'destination_page_name' to /add_urls/add_url, which will choose which destination watcher/url importer to place the url (or create a new one with that name)

updated client api version to 2

updated client help and unit tests for the above

added a linked contents to the client api help

improved some server error handling, mostly moving 403s to more correct 400s

improved how missing parameter 400 errors are reported from the server vs deeper keyerrors that should be 500

the rest:

tag repository update processing now saves progress to disk every million rows or every minute, whichever comes first. this reduces journaling bloat, improves recovery when the process quits unexpectedly, and makes for significantly faster cancel when requested by the user

when processing duplicates and copying/merging/moving ratings, the 'source' file will now also overwrite the 'destination' file's rating if that destination rating is lower (previously, the rating would only go over if the dest had no rating set)

added a new 'thumbnail experiment mode' under help->debug->gui. this will load fullsize thumbs and resize them in memory, please see release post for more details

reduced menubar replacement flicker while, I believe, keeping and strengthening recent menubar indexing stability improvements

the tag autocomplete dropdown will now always embed (instead of floating) in non-Windows

when data seems non-decodable, the fallback encoding format is now that given by chardet, rather than utf-8

improved serialisability of some pending tag data

watchers can now hold and pass on fixed pending tag data

gallery log objects can now hold and pass on fixed pending tag data

file import objects can now hold and action fixed pending tag data

hard drive imports now store their paths-to-tags info in this new format, directly in the file import objects

improved some url-import page drop-target-selection logic

improved error reporting when dropping/api-adding urls

adjusted some url import workflow so big 'already in db' download lists should work a bit faster

attempting to start the program with some external database files but not the main 'client.db/server.db' file will now cause a boot-fail exception with an explanation before any stub db files can be made

tightened up some hydrus service login-capability-testing code that was previously stopping certain error states from recovering promptly, even on a force account refresh, while the service was maxed on bandwidth

fixed a source of linux CRITICAL logspam related to several common dialogs

improved ui stability on boot when file folders are missing (particularly for linux)

improved stability for the various async tasks on the duplicates processing page, particularly for linux. I am not sure I got everything here, but it is definitely better

did some more misc stability improvements, particularly in various boot fail scenarios

completely removed an ancient and janky focus catcher widget from the main gui frame

now various db caching is improved on the python side, removed a sqlite instruction to force temp information to always stay in memory--hot data returns to staying mostly in memory to start and then spools to disk if the transaction gets too large

fixed approx bitrate sorting for malformed video files with explicitly '0' duration

daemon_profile_mode now spams some more info about export folders

fixed an issue that meant client db maintenance was firing its jobs too aggressively, regardless of idle status

updated windows build to cv 4.0

misc refactoring and fixes

next week

We are in the home stretch of the Client API now. I just want to write some simple file searching and it'll be done. I do not expect to be done in one week, but I think I should have something working for 342.

It felt good this week to clear out some long-time bugs doing code cleaning, so I'd like to focus on that as well.

#release

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bbnnfeed-blog · 6 years ago

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Navigating The Topsy-Turvy, High Stakes World of ICOs: Is There A Platform For That?

New Post has been published on https://bnn.io/news/navigating-topsy-turvy-high-stakes-world-icos-platform/?utm_source=Tumblr&utm_medium=socialpush&utm_campaign=SNAP

Navigating The Topsy-Turvy, High Stakes World of ICOs: Is There A Platform For That?

The global ICO market’s rapid emergence has been well documented. Percolating along at a frenzied pace for months, this space is now flush with scores of projects vying for attention and investment interest.

Amid this trend, the prevalence of scams and pump-and-dump schemes has escalated, creating uncertainty among many potential investors. A recent Wall Street Journal investigation, in fact, discovered that nearly 20 percent of 1,450 projects were clearly frauds. This has led to increased attention on the part of regulatory bodies like the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in terms of the monitoring of these unregistered “utility tokens.”

In addition, the move on the part of Facebook, Twitter, and Google to ban crypto related ads, has created a chilling effect on crypto projects and the promotion of these campaigns. Meanwhile, there has been a pronounced drop in prices on cryptocurrency markets leaving many investors skeptical and with fewer resources to put toward ICO investments.

The great innovation that ICOs brought to the table was their ability to remove a great deal of the friction associated with startup fundraising. But now with regulatory constraints, questionable projects, and a crowded ICO market, it’s becoming increasingly challenging for the average investor, even experienced ones, to make informed decisions about various ICO/STO opportunities.

Mike Finch

We here at BBNN recently interviewed Mike Finch, co-founder, and COO of ICO Alert, a trusted platform of active and upcoming Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) and Security Token Offerings (STOs) for his views on this rapidly emerging space. ICO Alert arguably has the most comprehensive list of Pre-ICOs (also referred to as pre-sales) and Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). It has published hundreds of in-depth ICO Alert reports, delivering insight into past, active, and upcoming ICOs. It also maintains a highly popular Alert Podcast, which features exclusive interviews with the largest founders and thought leaders in the blockchain space. Here are a few of Finch’s thoughts from the interview:

Take us back to mid-June and the SEC announcements that neither bitcoin and ether are not considered securities. What are your thoughts about these developments and what sort of impact will they have on token sales?

MF: Yes. In many ways, it was a good day for the crypto-sphere. Essentially, Ether was determined not to be a security by the SEC. And there was a handful of other informal guidance by a gentleman at the Yahoo finance summit as well. Lots of great news all around.

But I don’t recall that it specifically determined one way or another whether or not ERC20 tokens will be considered securities.

MF: No doubt, there are still some missing pieces from what I’ve been told and heard. Either way, it is good news as we, hopefully, move towards further regulatory guidance at a minimum. Obviously, some of these guidelines that were presented are not formal. They are not written into law. But it does give folks more information on how they should be conducting a token sale.

In other words, those in the ICO space should not see this as definitive?

MF: No. Clarity seems to be happening in baby steps. We will take it when we can get it. I hope it comes sooner rather than later.

So talk to us about ICO Alert and its value proposition for users?

MF: Absolutely, let me give you a brief history. ICO Alert was originally designed by my brother and me just for us, never as a website [or business] for anyone else. But we very quickly discovered a need in the ICO and cryptocurrency industry. Prior to us launching, it was very difficult for the average person to figure out which ICOs were raising money. ICO Alert came along as a comprehensive resource for the different token sales that are out there. We list ICOs, STOs, and Airdrops on our platform. We’re completely independent, which allows us to be comprehensive.

Describe the scope of your information gathering efforts?

MF: We’ve listed nearly 4,000 ICOs since the business launched on April 1, 2017. So if you look at Investing.com or your ICO Bench, or whatever the case, you’ll see that they do not have nearly as many token sales as we do. We don’t tell people what to invest in. Rather we give them the information they need to go through and use their own metrics to make their own decisions.

Describe the typical user of your site?

MF: Our typical user is one who has only been in the ICO space only for a couple of months or maybe weeks. A big problem we have in the space is ratings. A lot of sites have a lot of traffic and are giving out ratings that are completely subjective or, much worse, are paid for. What you have are a lot of new users searching for information [and] metrics, trying to make their own decisions. The problem is that the data they’re receiving is inaccurate, incomplete, or simply biased for some financial incentive.

How can this be changed?

MF: What I think it’s going to take like any other new asset, is education. In other words, the user needs to take the time to educate themselves. Cryptocurrency has been and continues to be considered a get rich quick scheme, one where you can spend a couple of days on it and immediately make a ton of money. In reality, that’s not the case. There are tons and tons of layers to understanding how to invest in cryptocurrency and where the value is. And the same case exists for ICOs. I think we’re coming to a realization in the ICO space that this isn’t as simple as throwing your money at these projects and then selling the token at a higher price anymore.

Reports continue to circulate in the media world about crypto heists and all of those ugly sorts of things that hurt the integrity of the space. How pervasive is this from your vantage point?

MF: That’s certainly a big question with many layers, one that’s not easy to answer. I think the majority of the time users are not falling victim to scams or having their cryptocurrency stolen. But reading about this in the media time and time again can make you feel like that might be the case. Fortunately, there are a lot of third-party solutions coming out to address these concerns.

Like?

MF: Hardware wallets are a big one. These projects continue to expand their offerings so that you don’t have to store your cryptocurrency on any exchange. Exchanges getting hacked, I would guess, are the most common way people are losing their cryptocurrency. Having a hardware wallet and understanding how it functions, how to communicate with it, how to store your various tokens on that wallet is a great first step.

In general, what are some cautionary tales in terms of what the average everyday person should be mindful of in terms of investing in an ICO?

MF: For example, there are a handful of things that we are doing at ICO Alert to make sure we are not listing scams. We want to make sure that these projects are holding themselves accountable and not doing something that is detrimental to a user. But more directly to your questions, newbies who are seeking to get into the ICO space certainly should start with things like Satoshi’s (bitcoin founder’s) white paper and basic information on how to store cryptocurrency on a hardware wallet. Then there are some big barriers to entry in the ICO space that, as ICO alert continues to grow, we hope to address. The biggest one is that [to] contribute to most ICOs you have to use bitcoin or ethereum, or even NEO. Communicating with an ICO via a smart contract can be very complicated. Understanding that process, finding those resources that are going to help with understanding that process, is going to be key before one actually look into which projects they want to invest in.

Talk with us about the regulatory environment. What are your opinions on that? Do you think it’s a good thing? Or will it create enormous barriers for the ICO space?

MF: That’s a great question [and] one that we constantly debate in the office. Honestly, this is probably the biggest barrier right now in terms of the continued growth of cryptocurrencies or ICOs. There are certainly some pros that regulation could bring, while at the same time really creating some unnecessary barriers to the space.

Can you elaborate on this a bit?

MF: Sure. If you look at ICOs for example, their main draw is that now anyone can fund a startup, whether you have ten dollars in Africa or a million dollars in New York City: you [can] fund one. You don’t need to be an accredited investor. You can do it online, you can, supposedly, access all the information you need to make that decision. But if now, at least in the United States, ICOs are illegal; you have these barriers that don’t allow a large portion of the investing world to contribute to what should be a decentralized, low barrier to entry investment vehicle.

So how do you think all of this will eventually shake out?

MF: It will be interesting for sure. Hopefully, we find some solution that is halfway, one where some compromises are made. But right now a bigger issue is easing some of the concerns among those out there who are seeking to raise money for their entrepreneurial project. It’s important for them to have a mechanism like ICOs for funding their startups or ideas. Otherwise, the United States and other countries are going to fall behind when it comes to innovation.

What are you looking to contribute to this quest at ICO Alert?

Our largest goal for 2018 is to collect anywhere from 150 to 200 data points on every single ICO, STO, and Airdrop that has ever existed. We’re not filtering our list by those who pay us. Nor are we filtering the list by some sort of subjective rating. We aren’t doing top 50, top 100, anything like that. We simply intend to collect information—we’ll be done relatively soon—for every single ICO that has ever existed so that we can be able to share this data with the average, everyday person. We’ll also be sharing it with institutional players: hedge funds and more traditional financial bodies who need this data. We believe we can present this information in really unique ways to our users so that as they continue to learn about which projects they think will be most successful. We’re super excited about unveiling these new projects this year and towards the beginning of next year.

Finally, what do you think is on the horizon for the remainder of 2018 in terms of ICOs and STOs?

MF: Another great question. Well, I am far from a fortune teller. But I do think that a lot of what occurs the remainder of this year is going to have to do with regulation. In particular, there is an opportunity for security tokens to take off this year if the regulatory uncertainty continues. I think there is an important context to consider in terms of why security tokens have a much longer road to travel than ICOs did. Custody is a big one. The ease of use or launch between STOs and ICOs are completely different.

Tell us more here?

MF: For a crypto asset like an ICO to have grown from where there were under 100 in 2016 up to nearly 2,000 in 2017 — that didn’t come simply because people were investing in them. A lot of that had to do with the fact that anyone could launch and ICO given that its a brand new crypto asset that’s unregulated and uses a decentralized token model to raise funds.

STOs don’t benefit from that same thing, and they have a lot of big questions that still need to be answered. Custody, as I said earlier, is a huge one. I am not convinced that STOs will be able to move quickly enough to take advantage of the current landscape. I think they will likely exist in the future but will act more as a tokenized version of the current securities out there.

And?

MF: I think there is plenty of room for both ICOs and STOs. We list both on our site, so we are neutral. I just think STOs will exist more for those securities that already exist [and] for those larger companies that are trying to cut costs in various ways. ICOs will continue to exist for the much smaller startup—the company trying to raise three, five, ten, twenty million versus massive 100 million dollar rounds like you’ve seen with Telegram and others. It certainly will be interesting to see how all of this eventually shakes out.

Michael Scott is Editor-In-Chief of Blockchain Business News Network

#ICO's

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bbnnfeed-blog · 6 years ago

Text

Navigating The Topsy-Turvy, High Stakes World of ICOs: Is There A Platform For That?

New Post has been published on https://bbnn.io/2018/06/navigating-topsy-turvy-high-stakes-world-icos-platform/

Navigating The Topsy-Turvy, High Stakes World of ICOs: Is There A Platform For That?

Mike Finch

But I don’t recall that it specifically determined one way or another whether or not ERC20 tokens will be considered securities.

In other words, those in the ICO space should not see this as definitive?

MF: No. Clarity seems to be happening in baby steps. We will take it when we can get it. I hope it comes sooner rather than later.

So talk to us about ICO Alert and its value proposition for users?

Describe the scope of your information gathering efforts?

Describe the typical user of your site?

How can this be changed?

Reports continue to circulate in the media world about crypto heists and all of those ugly sorts of things that hurt the integrity of the space. How pervasive is this from your vantage point?

Like?

In general, what are some cautionary tales in terms of what the average everyday person should be mindful of in terms of investing in an ICO?

Talk with us about the regulatory environment. What are your opinions on that? Do you think it’s a good thing? Or will it create enormous barriers for the ICO space?

Can you elaborate on this a bit?

So how do you think all of this will eventually shake out?

What are you looking to contribute to this quest at ICO Alert?

Finally, what do you think is on the horizon for the remainder of 2018 in terms of ICOs and STOs?

Tell us more here?

And?

Michael Scott is Editor-In-Chief of Blockchain Business News Network

#ICO's

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