Funder and founder of the Generator, the Ebono Institute provides the techincal foundation of the network and contributes content on technology, artificial intelligence and efforts to build morality into the DNA of the system.
BLOCKCHAIN: Starting Guide For Beginners, All About Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies, Mining And Future Of Money was self published by Brian Reel in January 2018 and provides a high level overview in straightforward business English.
Reel takes us through the actual processes of creating, using and trading in BitCoin as well as different ways of using the blockchain on which BitCoin is built. Each topic is dealt with in a practical way. The chapter on mining bitcoins, for example, discusses the method by which the block chain is stored and promulgated and how that is applied in the creation of new BitCoins (mining) and how companies are engaging in that mining exercise.
The information is general, providing information for the educated layperson, rather than providing technical information or specific methods for engaging in these activities. Like many of the introductory texts, especially those self published, the book is short and snappy, skipping across the surface of these complex topics.
For those who want to get an overview of the landscape quickly, this is probably ideal. Those who prefer to take more control of their research, though, a weekend on your favourite search engine may produce more useful (and current) results.
You can buy the ebook for $US0.99 by clicking here.
Whether you are an investor, a programmer or an entrepreneur BitCoin will radically and directly change your life in the next couple of years.
School teachers, activists and artists might not be directly in the firing line but Bitcoin’s underlying technology, the blockchain, is going to affect us all. The questions are how and how fast.
This article answers your basic questions about the blockchain and tells you where to go for more in-depth information
What is this thing called Blockchain?
If you doubt the radical changes that technology has wrought on society in the last three decades, just watch the queue for wifi at the Guangzhou Airport. We are so addicted to the Internet it is the first thing we organise when we get to our accommodation on a weekend away, move house, or plan where we will spend the day working “out of the office”.
The Blockchain is the next layer of the network that already connects us and enables our communal activity.
The telecommunications network allowed us to speak to each other, leave messages and then, by 1964, send electronic signals and printed documents. The microchip allowed us to use personal productivity software to do things that had previously required volumes of pen and paper. The combination of the two allows us to maintain our diary, perform our banking, watch movies, take photographs and share all of that activity with loved ones, friends and colleagues over a hand held device. Most of us now see the smart phone and our connection to the network as an essential accessory in our daily life.
Now, that networked computer has been empowered by the addition of a public record of all the transactions we perform. That public record is called the blockchain and it provides an accurate, immutable history of relevant online activity that will change the nature of trust. That reliable and permanent record of all transactions will rapidly replace the public record, institutions and governance in ways that we can only begin to imagine. It will be applied to supply chain logistics, as well as all transactions where a chain of custody, provenance or proof of ownership is importance.
Think about it.
We currently keep our money in a bank because we trust the bank to keep it safe. As that money has become completely virtual, we connect to the bank simply to record our transactions so that we can check our balance and make spending decisions based on accurate, up-to-date information. Now that the network itself has an accurate, up-to-date record of all our transactions and our account balance, the role of the bank is significantly reduced.
And that is just the role of the BitCoin. Imagine the same technology applied to documents that record ownership. Every online photograph can be registered and every use of it tracked using the blockchain. Lab results, works of art, any object worth protecting can be protected by the blockchain. A complete chain of custody, provenance, or transaction history can be recorded automatically as an object moves through different hands.
This can be applied to the storage of personal health records, the maintenance history of a car, the tagging of electrical appliances, viewing of online files.
This transition will take some time, just as the smartcard has taken some time to replace cash. When we think about the transition from credit cards, through eftpos to smartcards and cashless transactions and then the current wave of cardless transactions we can see that these revolutions have long lead times and then very rapid implementations once the technology reaches a critical mass. Each wave of that transition had its own impact on the businesses involved and the impact over the last two decades has been remarkable.
We are now reaching the point where BitCoin has moved out of the experimental and speculative phase into mainstream investing and blockchain applications are being implemented in organisations worldwide and the technology is being built into mainstream operating systems and development environments.
What do you need to know?
RIght now the world of virtual currency is exploding. Initial coin offerings (ICOs) are disrupting the financial landscape and entrepreneurs are exploring a brave new world of distributed applications to facilitate business models that were considered fanciful half a decade ago.
The adventures of BitCoin have been well publicised – if not well explained – and most of us understand that something big is afoot, but we are not sure exactly what.
The good news is the basic technologies are now well established and understood and a second generation of books explaining it all has emerged. Luckily, these books are targeted at specific audiences: Entrepreneurs, corporate managers, programmers, academics and investors. There are quick-to-read books that cost little and explain things simply as well as in-depth books to help you to make strategic decisions or, at least, decide strategically where to focus your further investigations. The
This article introduces you to the cream of the crop. We have deliberately selected books available both physically and as ebooks. We have provided links to Amazon so that you can load them directly into your Kindle at a couple of clicks, but given you the details needed to shop around and get them in your preferred format, from your preferred provider as fast as possible.
Conclusion
Some people prefer to do their own research, others to get information packaged in a dense and digestible package, tailored to their needs. The introductory texts discussed here provide a quick introduction in such a manner, though the very short ones do not provide much more depth than a weekend session with Dr Google.
Despite being the darling of IT developers, the failure of WooCommerce Subscriptions to support traditional content developers
has serious implications for WooCommerce’s reputation in the wider community.
With 2 million stores using WooCommerce it is by far and away the most popular solution for ecommerce in the world. It has been gaining market share from other similar platforms over the last five years and remains almost ten times bigger than its main rival, Shopify, which is aimed at the absolute beginner market happy to use a hosted shop to sell a handful of goods.
It is little wonder then, that the official WooCommerce stamp on Woocommerce Subscriptions has seen it race ahead of its rivals in the market and attract a significant volume of business. Its role as one of the lead components in the Woocommerce Membership package has not hurt its reputation either.
The WooCommerce Members Bundle retails for $299 per year and provides a membership solution, subscriptions, management of downloadable files, a stripe payments gateway, a bidding system (Name your Price) and a bunch of themes.
It is billed as the complete solution to managing a commercial memberships site and we compared that with Memberpress and a number of other comprehensive products in the market before recommending it as a suitable solution for our client.
All the products making up the bundle claim to be comprehensive but as you get down to the nitty gritty, they are generally designed for a purpose and have been stretched and st
WooCommerce Subscriptions, by Prospress, is ideally suited to software developers who want to monetise their tools and widgets by extracting regular payments from customers who, a decade ago, would have downloaded the product once and then reluctantly paid for support or upgrades every five years or so.
It is not quite so well suited for content developers, though.
The challenges emerge when you want to use it to do what every magazine and newspaper publisher in the world does, that is, sell content to some people under different packaging arrangements. In this world, a subscription generally means an advance payment that gives you access to content that other people have to purchase.
For example, I might sell memberships to a certain class of customer using the integration between Subscriptions and Memberships to manage the renewals of the membership sales. As soon as I assign any content to that group of customers, though, it becomes their exclusive property and everyone else is simply told they have to buy a membership to see it.
The first line of challenge is that WooCommerce Subscriptions are supported by Prospress , Memberships by SkyVerge and Subscriptions Downloads by the WordPress Woocommerce team known as Automattic. You very quickly start to get referred around in circles unless you can identify a specific problem as “belonging” to one or the other of the three parties.
The second problem is that the “support” that is offered is really just pre-sales hand holding. Any one who can read the basic manuals provided can answer the questions most people will have on installing the product and setting it up.
As soon as your request crosses the line of “our product does not do that out of the box” you are directed away from the support area to the advanced users forums and facebook pages, where there are lots of traps for young players. On one hand, the more straight forward enquiries tend to be met with, “I hate to be the a..hole, but can you explain what is advanced about that question?”
On the other hand, as soon as the question has any serious content the standard responses tend to be “Why don’t you get yourself a developer?”
We quickly gathered a library of comments at both end of the spectrum.
Most of those problems we found workarounds to, without any support from the software companies but some support from independent freelancers who know woocommerce well.
Once we started to delve into GitHub and the code itself, to get some serious answers to the more pesky questions, though, we realised there are some really serious problems with this software.
Bugs and denial
Our problems quickly fell into a couple of areas.
Missing functionality
Automated emails Despite being advertised as a complete commercial solution for managing a membership and subscription system with lots of glowing descriptions of the automated emails that would relieve your admin staff of every having to work again, it turns out you have to buy an additional product Follow Ups to get all but the most basic email features. Neither Prospress nor Automattic deigned to answer our email suggesting that it was an unreasonable exclusion given the marketing hype around automation.
Import export The Subscriptions developer, Prospress, offers a beta version of an import feature which failed to carry out a number of functions. We eventually got it to work on a basic subscription but it failed to deal with the variable subscriptions our client was selling adequately. A commercial product by Xadapter, worked well but did not handle subscription downloads. On being advised of this, Xadapter had a working solution within 48 hours.
A product is charged for each time a file is attached to it
Good old fashioned bugs
Xadapter responded to our bug report without missing a beat. Yes you are right our product does not do that and it should, we will notify you when it is fixed, and then it was fixed.
Automattic, on the other hand, has been sitting on the report of a major bug for two weeks and despite regular contact has not once provided a road map for repair, or acknowledgement that the problem is serious. And it is. If you have a subscription product with three files attached, that product gets listed and charged three times in the renewal. This means that customers are getting invoices for multiples of the price they agreed to pay.
Undesirable behaviour
These are always the hardest problems to fix, because one customer’s core business may be on another customer’s wish list and a long way down the developer’s forward plan.
We understand that, and indicated a willingness and a desire to be pointed to the right areas of the software to make the changes ourselves.
We have already tweaked the system to allow subscriptions to filter the available product by date (not out of the box) and to prevent downloading of streamable content (get yourself a developer) and to bypass the restrictions that woocommerce downloads places on audio and video players (we did not even ask).
The main problem is one that affects all content developers who sell content as individual products but would like to package it as part of a subscription as well. I have already talked about the failure of the Membership system to differentiate between a free and a paying customer, with the subscription system it gets worse.
I can sell someone a subscription and then supply them with free content during the life of their subscription that other people can buy at the same time.
A $149 subscription renews at thousands of dollars
So far so good.
The nightmare occurs when it is time to renew the subscription.
Now the system checks what products form part of the subscription and charges the customer for the renewal of their original subscription, plus ALL the products that have been given to them during the life of the subscription. When this is compounded with the bug that causes the multiplication of the number of products by the number of files each product contains, our client has subscribers who are being charged $7,000 for what they thought was a $149 subscription!
This is a serious PR disaster.
Is WooMembers bundle for you?
If you are a software developer monetising your products this product works perfectly. It was built for people like you, by people like you.
If you are a content developer looking for something to manage your business model make sure that your development cycle allows you to test your business model in this software within the 30 day money back period. You can achieve this by thinking hard about what your business model is, and then setting out a plan to implement a test case of this before you download and install the software on a trial basis. Once you have verified that it will do what you need, then you can take the time to work through the cosmetics and the customer messaging.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 13 — The Pentagon has been using a little-known power to obtain banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage inside the United States, part of an aggressive expansion by the military into domestic intelligence gathering.
The telecommunications network 
And that is just the role of the BitCoin. Imagine the same technology applied to documents that record ownership. Every online photograph can be registered and every use of it tracked using the blockchain. Lab results, works of art, any object worth protecting can be protected by the blockchain. A complete chain of custody, provenance, or transaction history can be recorded automatically as an object moves through different hands. 
Some people prefer to do their own research, others to get information packaged in a dense and digestible package, tailored to their needs. The introductory texts discussed here provide a quick introduction in such a manner, though the very short ones do not provide much more depth than a weekend session with Dr Google. 
