Daily: European commission invests $370M in Blockchain

Hey everyone and welcome to Box Mining. Today we're going to look at the market first of all, followed by some positive news regarding blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. First we have the European Commission. They're almost investing $370 million into blockchain projects because they realized the value of decentralized trust. Then we're going to follow up with what's happening with Facebook because previously there was a whole Facebook Delete Me campaign because they sold our data. And we're going to look at that closely and we're going to really see from this why a decentralized source and decentralized trust is really important for everyone. Finally we're going to take a look and follow up on this whole India situation. What's really happening with blockchain there? We had a lot of community engagement from the Box Mining community on Telegram. We've been chatting and discussing what's happening in India and how really blockchain is still going to progress there. But maybe just the cryptocurrency aspect of that might be stalled for a little bit. So all this and more on today's Box Mining Daily. I do want to say that everything covered here is my personal opinion and not financial advice. So let's start off with the markets first of all. So we're on $265 billion. So nothing's really changed that much for the past few days. While Bitcoin is really staying very steady, there are a few coins that are going up in value. So EOS is up almost 12%. And there's a recent announcement of this DAWN 3.0, their newest updates. And they found some new ways to optimize their network as well. So I'm going to cover that in a little bit more detail in a nutshell video. We also have some updates. NEO is up still. We've got VeChain pushing up over new announcements with the LV crew. And lastly, we have Ontology as well. It's really climbing up. When it listed on Binance, it dropped from $2 to around $1. It didn't have an ICO. It was all mostly airdrop. So now it's just climbing up a little bit up, a little bit up every day. It's almost like $4.59. Moving on to the news, we have the European Commission today. They issued a statement saying, yeah, we want to cooperate more with our countries in part of this union. We want to join forces of AI. But more importantly right now, they're building a European blockchain initiative. They're investing around $370 million. So this might not be that much. I mean, ICOs are raising that almost on a monthly basis. But what this does show is that there are countries that are taking blockchain seriously. They know that this technology needs to be encouraged. So at this point, we see a shuffling. Blockchain isn't just a pet project for tech nerds. It's growing more and more popular in the mainstream space. Now, why this is useful is for events like this. Say, for example, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified yesterday in front of the Senate over this selling of user data. This really unauthorized sell of data to Cambridge Analytica. We cannot trust Facebook with all our data, our personal information. We cannot trust Google to provide that search, that key point of researching things. And Google is really gathering a lot of data on us as well. The more and more bigger these guys get, and even if they have a model that says, you know, trust us. We're good. We're the good guys. Do no evil. Eventually, it's going to become a point where they're more and more powerful. They are more and more profit-driven. Facebook made almost $40 billion in ad revenue last year. They want more money, and if we surrender everything to them, it's going to be a point where we're going to end up with nothing ourselves. So this is why the decentralized trust is important, having a decentralized app version of it, where we are the possessors of that data. Let's take a look at India as well. So the whole instance that's brewing up is that RBI, the biggest bank in India that kind of controls everything, they banned basic communication with cryptocurrency exchanges. This is why exchanges, for example, Zedpay, which is one of the biggest exchanges in India, they recently got this communication that there was a discontinuation of the services RBI provides, which means that, well, it's going to be harder to get money into an exchange. So cutting people off, people's access to cryptocurrency at the kind of banking level. But I do want to remind everyone that this is an RBI decision. This is a bank decision and not a minister, a government decision. So cryptocurrencies are still legal. These exchanges are allowed to operate. In fact, it seems like there are still projects running in India as well. Blockchain technology itself needs to be encouraged in India. An example of blockchain technology already solving problems in India is with the Zebi project. So the Andhra Pradesh state has partnered with Zebi to secure almost 100,000 land registry records. This way, these land registry records cannot be tampered with because we do know that blockchains, once they're formed, once blocks formed on the blockchain, they remain permanent. And if you want to alter any records, you have a permanent trace of that. So instead of looking for papers, looking for documents, or even on a centralized database, we have a decentralized trusted version of that where we can rapidly look up records and also look at what changes happen. And we can do so in a trustless fashion. So that's what Zebi is doing. And they're bringing really top talent into India to solve solutions rather than to just really speculate. So this is what I really support this year. We talked about how cryptocurrencies is going to really blow up and sort issues with remittance, sort issues with the unbanked, banking the unbanked, transferring value. And I definitely see Southeast Asia as a central hub for where these solutions can be actively applied to solve real-world problems today. So that's kind of my view. I have a very hopeful view of cryptocurrencies. Right now, I know the market isn't the most exciting thing in the world, but at the same time, in terms of development, we're really pushing ahead. In terms of acceptance, if you just watch Silicon Valley, the HBO show, they've been talking about decentralization, decentralized trust for the whole entire season. So if you want any evidence of that coming into popular culture, that would be it.