I receive many requests from companies who seek advice on how to use the Blockchain, but I believe there is something that must be done even before using the Blockchain technology.
That is to manage their business like the Blockchain.
What’s in my bag
How I live in the decentralized world
As a permanent Airbnb resident or as a lifetime traveler, I need to carry much stuff while I’m not at my office in Tokyo. However, I don’t want to work with ordinary tools. The best tools which blown my mind away are the only things I need.
Sayonara, Japan’s Cryptocurrency Market
Binance
A number of negative incidents have occurred in succession within the cryptocurrency market of Japan.
The first is that the cryptocurrency exchange Binance has ceased its developments in Japan. They withdrew from the Japanese market after a warning from the Financial Services Agency that made it sound like they were committing a crime.
They had already achieved remarkable results in the industry. It is true that by skirting certain regulations and taxes, they weren’t competing on a level playing field with other businesses. However, they were a genuine fin-tech company that was an industry leader in innovation. It is regrettable that their expansion into Japan has come to an end.
ICO fraud, hard fork fraud, simple fraud
So many frauds
There are rampant frauds by phishing websites that disguise as exchanges. What is more, their methods are also becoming increasingly cunning, sometimes leading the victims to enter their own private keys, tricking them into thinking that they are being helped to retrieve cryptocurrencies that have been sent as a mistake. We might even start seeing things like “private key storage services” that eventually demand ransom cryptocurrencies from their users.
It goes without saying that we must be careful not to be tricked by these straightforward frauds. However, we need to be especially alert against more shrewd frauds. I will not name them here, but there are so many of them in the world of cryptocurrency.
“Social Evaluation” will become everything
I live in an Airbnb.
If you ask me why, it’s because I’m certain that an era of a new sense of value will begin. It’s the era where “Social Evaluation” will become everything.
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You don’t need Mozart in a rock band
A company is a band
A startup is a band.
About 10 years ago, a “legend” at my company entered as an advisor. He was an expert who had created a certain software, and he was an extremely famous person. At the time, he had the desire to grow young startups as a post-retirement career, so he joined us.
Although he had joined us as an advisor, I felt that his way of thinking was outdated with every little thing, and it irritated me when we had meetings. I was still okay, but the engineers started to complain too.
Our cultural differences soon came to light, with people saying,
What that person is saying is a sound argument, but he doesn’t understand our development direction at all. The old way of doing things doesn’t suit us at all.
Why create a Slack account, rather than collect e-mail addresses?
The importance of Slack
In 2017, we ran a number of events. At the time, we discussed whether or not we should collect e-mail addresses. I felt that there was not much point in doing this, so I have now collected the messages that I sent to members of the management team at the time.
We do not really look at e-mails very much, do we?
I believe that Slack will become increasingly more important in the future. Among groups of technical people, there have recently been many that have created their own Slack channels. I believe that this usage is likely to grow even more.
Up until now, the main technique used was to ask people to sign up for a mailing list. However, communication styles have now started to change, so much so that an increasing number of technical people do not even tend to use e-mail in the first place, opting instead for chat-based communication or Slack channels. I have no doubt that whether you have a Slack account or not will become an increasingly important point in the future. In fact, it will become akin to the olden day technique of collecting e-mail addresses.
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Since it’s 2018, these are the things I’ve decided to stop doing
I want to live in a world I can believe in
The picture you see is a New Year’s gift I gave this year. I didn’t want to receive these young people, who still have their entire futures ahead of them, so I gave them a gift using a currency I could believe in. I was told last year to stop putting these strange ideas into their heads, but this year, it went so smoothly I could hardly believe it. I also took the chance to explain to them how to use and manage their gift.
And now, it’s 2018. The future is practically now. So, I’d like to announce a few, not quite new year’s resolutions, but things I’ve decided I really have to stop doing, as an expression of my determination.
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Beyond the startup
I went to CERN
I visited CERN. I’m going to make an announcement later, but I made an official appointment before visiting.
I remember it even now. It was a special TV program about the Internet revolution that I had once seen while I was a child. It was an episode about Tim Berners-Lee giving birth to the WWW at CERN, and Andreessen developing Mosaic. The Internet nowadays has all started from the WWW.
And I went to the birthplace of the WWW.
Bitcoin: The Land of Asura
Power is everything
Power rules over all in the world of virtual currencies.
The world of cryptocurrencies; a decentralized society in which individual power is everything. In order to survive in this decentralized society absolute power is essential.
Why is it that when you use cryptocurrencies the fees are so low? It’s because there are no middlemen taking a cut. On the flip side, it’s a fact that the convenience to users and improvements to the security offered by the centralized control are done away with when these costs are removed.