Blockchains and crypto 101 in Toronto

#Hello #humans and well-meaning #bots,

This past week I prepared for my first blockchain and cryptocurrency themed meetup and although I was nervous the @agorise team was there to answer all my questions and to help keep things in perspective. My purpose was not to lecture on the topics of day, which was basic understanding of what PoW cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Monero and Litecoin are and how they compare to DPoS blockchains like we have here at Steemit and over at Bitshares with a few others seeing the light and making the move, to at the very least, Proof of Stake.

We are still very new on the social adoption front

Millions of new users have been on-boarded in the last few months, myself included and that's a great step in the right direction but of those millions of people on this planet who converted their local fiat currency to a digital token or coin for the very first time, in the last 5 or 6 months. Most have a very limited understanding of how blockchain technology works and what problems it solves. This is unfortunately going to lead to investors being burned on the first go at it. The 1000x "easy money" gains are most certainly over for most projects and FOMO caused people to jump in to an over-bought December BTC market without averaging in their principle capital to alleviate market risks. We MUST now focus on solid, tested, community run and governed platforms that don't waste millions of dollars on expensive mining hardware and electricity. Not ill conceived fluffy whitepapers of ICO's lacking real world use case scenario's try to accomplish what is already happening here at Bitshares and Steemit.

This is a time to teach ourselves and others about the benefits of a properly researched investment strategy

All coins, tokens and distributed ledgers are not created equal. We must understand that a generic whitepaper for a new token promising industry dominance is not a foregone conclusion as a 100x investment. That's why some of the brightest minds are working hard day after day to improve and refine the platform that @dantheman and his team created for us in Graphene which powers BitShares and Steemit.

As our Toronto meetup progressed and I began to introduce the attendees to the Bitshares platform by first demonstrating the insanely fast, crypto payment service, called PalmPay (www.palmpay.io)

It was a very positive experience for me. Hosting this group of intelligent, business professionals, of varying occupations and investment history's coming together to discuss and learn about crypto and blockchain

Later in the evening I was able to test the new payment system that @kencode and his team have created. For the first time ever a bar patron purchased alcohol from their mobile bitcoin wallet and had it confirmed in seconds. If it had been @openledger openBTC or bitBTC it would have been practically feeless too.

I have begun posting that I am accepting all the best crypto's with the super simple PalmPay app for all my local classified transactions on kijiji, craigslist and letgo. If we all start accepting SBD, EOS, STEEM, LTC, BITUSD, #Quint or BTS for P2P markets for goods using P2P crypto payment solutions we will all win by growing our economy from the ground up rather than waiting for Amazon to bless us with their own centralized blockchain currency.

Thank you @stan for making me aware of Bitshares through a probably syndicated talk radio show playing in early December on #TALK640 in Toronto. Without you spreading the BitShares gospel I would very likely never been drawn to this great group of Agorists @agorise

Let's all try to get @ivanli to SMASH! the upvotes for me please, he's hosting an amazing @dlive crypto stream that will bring thousands of new members to the Steemit blockchain each and every month.

Bless!