According to a recent report, cryptocurrency searches have almost tripled over the last six months. This is in light of the current COVID-19 pandemic which has brought the world to its knees. People are fully aware that the ongoing crisis is going to adversely affect the economy hence they are looking for a haven to store their wealth. Normally they would turn to gold, but as they say “cryptocurrencies are the new gold.” This leads us to the next very critical question; what is a cryptocurrency? I would like to believe that most of my readers have come across this term before because cryptocurrencies have been making headlines and grabbing so much attention lately. However, for those who have never heard of this term before, you have so much catching up to do; but don’t you worry because I’ve got you covered.
Cryptocurrencies are digital coins whose operation is exclusively online.
Most of them do not have a physical representation. Also, they have the same uses as the fiat money we are accustomed to. Some common cryptocurrencies include Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, and Monero. One of the many ways in which cryptocurrencies differ from traditional money is in the way that they are acquired. While traditional money is distributed by central banks, cryptocurrencies are bought from online exchanges. As a beginner in crypto, you need an exchange that is user-friendly and available in your country. Very many people want to embark on their cryptocurrency journey but do not know just where to start. Today there are very many exchanges to choose from; Gemini and Coinbase are two of the biggest and most trusted exchanges out here. The following “Gemini vs Coinbase” review explores the two exchanges in such a way that you will be able to make an informed decision about which one suits you best
Gemini vs Coinbase: what is Gemini?
Gemini is a well-respected cryptocurrency exchange which was founded in 2015. Its mane is a reference to the zodiac sign that depicts a pair of twins which is quite clever because it is the brainchild of the Winklevoss twins. Its creators are two of the earliest investors in Bitcoin. With its headquarters in New York and strict compliance with existing regulation; the exchange has quickly become a favorite among high-volume investors and institutional traders. One of its outstanding features is that it offers extra security to its users, unlike most other exchanges. This exchange is all-rounded; it allows its users to purchase cryptocurrencies using fiat money which is not the case for many exchanges. It also offers an “on and off-ramp” to cryptocurrency making it a direct competitor with the likes of CEX.io, Kraken, and Bitstamp. It also offers users a lot of extra security features that are lacking in many exchanges.
Distinctive Features
Has highly respected staples of the cryptocurrency industry
Offers both bank and wire deposit options
Responsive customer support
Allows both cryptocurrency and fiat money withdrawals
Offers advanced trading options in the form of different kinds of buy and sell orders
Within the US, it accepts deposits made using Automated Clearing House (ACH)
Gemini supported states include Hong Kong, Puerto Rico, South Korea, Canada, and the US
Accepts both cryptocurrency and fiat money
Offline storage of cryptocurrency and fiat money to protect from hacking
Coinbase Vs Gemini: what is Coinbase?
Coinbase is arguably the most popular digital currency globally. Its headquarters are currently in San Francisco, California and it was established by Fred Ehrsam and Brian Armstrong in 2011. Coinbase is user-friendly and easy to maneuver as compared to other exchanges. It also offers various options for buying and purchasing different digital assets. Most cryptocurrency exchanges are advanced with sophisticated buying and selling options such as ‘limit orders’ and ‘market orders’. It is the absence of these sophisticated features that make Coinbase well suited for beginners. Once you get accustomed to the exchange you can then progress to GDAX which is a more advanced platform that is associated with Coinbase.
Distinctive features
Available in over 100+ countries including USA, UK, Canada, Singapore, and Australia
It offers very responsive customer support
Deals with both cryptocurrency and fiat money
Offers simplified instant buying options
Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin are available
Both the money and cryptocurrency are stored offline for protection from hacking
Gemini vs Coinbase: How is Gemini better than Coinbase?
Better security
First of all, both exchanges take their customers’ protection very seriously and have additional security measures in place. They both separate the users’ money from the money which they use to operate. And also enforce the two-factor authentication which decreases the likelihood of an account being hacked or phished. Those are just a few of the security measures that both exchanges have put in place.
Gemini however, takes some extreme measures to secure its customers’ funds. They have secured the few digital assets that are stored online in a hot wallet using Amazon Web Services which high level of security controls. Also, only high-level employees can access the coins stored on hot wallets not to mention the hot wallets are accessed through multi-factor authentication (more advanced than two-factor authentication). They use two-level cold storage whose access to cold storage requires the simultaneous actions of more than one employee, thus increasing security. Both hot and cold wallet keys are secured on hardware that has passed a high level of security checks. Lastly, security hardware comes from different manufacturers to prevent supply-chain issues. These extreme measures could be the reason why it was picked by the Chicago Board Options Exchange to settle its Bitcoin futures in 2017. Its high-security precautions make it a better alternative for professional traders who store large volumes of cryptocurrency. However, be advised that exchanges are not suitable for long term storage.
2. Lower fees
Gemini outperforms Coinbase when it comes to fees; they are your best bet to save as much as possible on fees. It does not charge fees for deposits or withdrawals and it only charges a 0.25% or even less fee for trading. Coinbase on the other hand charges around 1.49% for bank transfers and purchases and 3.99% for credit/debit card purchases. Thanks to their very low fees, Gemini is the best alternative for high-volume traders. Most professional traders feel that Coinbase eats a very huge chunk of their profits.
Coinbase vs Gemini: How is Coinbase better than Gemini?
User-friendliness
Coinbase certainly beats Gemini when it comes to user-friendliness. Their website is not only easy to maneuver but also quite responsive. They offer an immediate option for buying and selling digital coins. You can signup, make a deposit into the site and successfully buy your first cryptocurrency in just a matter of seconds. Although the registration at both Gemini and Coinbase is pretty much alike, Coinbase is much easier for a beginner to maneuver. There are no confusing terms, you just log in and conduct your transactions. Gemini is friendlier for experienced traders because it has more advanced features; it offers a clutter-free interface, clean and the options are set out. However, for an absolute beginner, Coinbase is the charm.
Higher trade volumes
Most new users make their first few purchases using Coinbase because it is very user friendly; it is therefore not surprising that the exchange trades more coins than Gemini. For instance, in 5 months. Coinbase can trade over 5.20 BTC while Gemini only trades 1.7 BTC.
Coin availability
While both platforms offer a small variety of cryptocurrencies, Coinbase has a better coin availability than Gemini. They provide Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash; while Gemini provides Bitcoin and Ethereum only. This makes Coinbase a better option for traders who prefer to deal with a wider variety of coins.
Extensive deposit methods
Coinbase and Gemini both have different ways of funding their customers’ accounts. However, Coinbase offers more extensive deposit methods; their customers can buy their digital coins using a debit card, a credit card or a bank transfer. While Gemini only offers the bank transfer option. Cryptocurrency deposits are welcome for the specific cryptocurrencies supported by either exchange. Withdrawals follow the same deposit methods for either exchange.
Offers higher purchasing limits
Coinbase does not give any clear limits on new customers; instead, these limits are dictated by factors such as account verification, buying history and account age. The customer’s limit is shown on his/her account’s verification page. Bank transfer limits can reach up to $5,000 per week while credit card limits can go up to $60 per week. Gemini, on the other hand, has predefined bank transfers purchasing limits of $ 500 per day. Therefore, Coinbase is your better option if you are looking to immediately lock in a price higher than $500. Lastly, both Gemini and Coinbase offer wire transfers for those users looking to deposit larger sums; though prior direct communication with them is mandatory.
Conclusion
There you have it! Our complete guide of Gemini vs Coinbase. I hope that helped in distinguishing between the two exchanges. Coinbase is recommended for beginners; despite its high fees the convenience and user-friendliness are commendable. It is also the best option for you if you want to use a credit card. Gemini, on the other hand, is best for experienced traders, those who want to take their trading to another level. It is also a great option when it comes to saving on fees. With both sites being trustworthy, secure and very responsive to their customers; the winner of the Gemini vs Coinbase battle boils down to the user’s needs and preferences. What do you think? Which one is better? Is it Gemini or is it Coinbase?
MARKETING HAS EVOLVED OVER THE LAST 100 YEARS, SO WHAT'S NEW?
I came across an interesting theory by Mark Schaefer, Blogger, and Keynote Speaker of all things marketing, and I thought it was quite on point. This puts a broader perspective on how we conduct our marketing efforts and how things have changed over the last 100 years.
The role of marketing is changing dramatically. We are in the third rebellion where consumers are now in control. The customers are telling our stories. The customer is the marketer.
Back in the 1950s, advertising was a promise to consumers. An extraordinary promise and generally people just took the advertisers at their word. They’ve believed their claims. Advertising started to heat up and as the competition became more fierce, these claims became more remarkable until they became just lies. So the first consumer rebellion was "the end of lies".
The advent of the second rebellion came around the mid-’90s by the sound of a phone line dial tone connecting to the internet signal. It was the dawn of the information age and enabled by technology, where anybody could gather info on any company or government that left the companies terrified. Now the consumers can do their own research, compare products and claims. This was the second rebellion, led by technology, "the end of secrets".
Now we’re in the third rebellion, "the end of control". Today we are experiencing that consumers are now in control. They are a lot more skeptical about what they’re are being told through bold advertisements, so now what? What does a business do to win over a customer these days?
Before the internet, we mostly kept our brand experiences to ourselves. Maybe we told a few people in our innermost circles. Only a minority of people were motivated to complain or compliment the brand, wrote, or called the company. Once the internet arrived, a few more emailed companies their thoughts.
Then came social media.
Image by contentgroup
In the mid-2000s as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube launched, marketers discovered that not only could they advertise there, but consumers could express their feelings and share their experiences with brands there. Suddenly consumers had the same kind of broad media platform that brands had enjoyed for years. Social media reversed the communication flow of brand messages and turbocharged it.
Social media is producing little pockets or groups of consumers engaging and sharing positive or negative information about their experiences of any given brand or company. Markets are now conversations and customers are in control of those conversations. Businesses can no longer buy their way in, they need to be invited and that’s what marketing is about today.
How Can We Connect With Potential Customers?
We can go to the core of where our customers are who are sharing their thoughts or grievances with their peers. By listening and engaging more on channels such as social media, customer support, forums, and the like, we can experience and understand the consumers’ point of view.
Connecting with them through writing blogs and articles, consistently, of interesting and relevant information will create an authoritative presence, perhaps meet a customer’s need and provide a solution that perhaps can’t be recognized in a short advertising message. This is otherwise known as content marketing which can create conversations and is a good way to be invited into the consumers’ hearts and minds.
We can’t always control what people think of our brand, but we are able to influence it and reduce any negative experiences by being present and mindful of consumers’ perspectives. It’s a known fact that solving problems can have a greater impact on the individual who will sing your praises and even become a loyal advocate. The humanity that causes consumers to brand experiences also promotes understanding, forgiveness, and enthusiasm.
BE MORE HUMAN in everything you do and every engagement you make. It’s about building relationships and connecting at an authentic and genuine level. The most human company wins.
It’s not just about our “why.” It’s also about their “why.”
What is their “purpose”? Many people only buy based on their beliefs.
Technology should be used to help your company be more compassionate, receptive, fascinating, and useful.
Marketing isn’t about making promises. It’s about keeping promises.
Content Marketing Of All Types Still Rule
There are many different forms of Content Marketing, such as blogging, video tutorials, digital media, email newsletters, white papers, free reports, etc, and yet many people are confused about the entire concept.
Content Marketing means creating and sharing valuable free content to attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers or loyal followers. The type of content you share is closely related to what you sell, whether it’s a product, a belief, a cause, or a corporate or personal brand. In other words, you’re educating people so that they know, like, and trust you enough to do business with you.
All businesses are now coming online as part of the next normal searching for different and various ways to not only make their presence known but also to offer the best experience for their prospects. Content marketing is a proven way to build an audience that builds your business. Here are some basic principles to note;
People generally don’t want “advertising” when making purchasing decisions, they want valuable information.
It’s content that people desire and seek out, and it’s great content that Google wants to rank well in the search results so those people can find your business.
It’s content that spreads via social networks, generating powerful word-of-mouth exposure for savvy content marketers.
It’s beneficial content that is the best way to achieve what advertising is supposed to achieve but doesn’t do so well online getting people to know, like, and trust your brand.
Remember, content drives the Internet, and consumers are looking for information that solves a problem, not an immediate sales pitch. Think about how to create content that makes your customers’ lives better, then the trust, credibility, and authority that content marketing creates knocks down sales resistance, all while providing a baseline introduction to the benefits of a particular product or service.
If your content looks like an advertisement, it will be overlooked or thrown away. Make your “advertising” too valuable to throw away by wrapping it in wonderfully beneficial, readable content.
The individuals and businesses that are having the most success online tend to have a high ratio of valuable content that seemingly has no sales agenda, and mixed with periodic promotional messages. They tend to build on a number of blogs answering any questions or allaying any objections they feel a reader or prospective buyer might have even before they realize they need or want to buy a product or service.
You will still need a strong call to action to close the sale, the trick is to keep the balance right. Use your content to build a desire for your product and create a steadfast relationship with your audience, then ask for the sale.
Producing stellar content for your marketing is great, but that’s only one part of the equation…
The Other Part Of The Equation
Your content must then be properly leveraged to help you acquire customers. Even great content doesn’t distribute itself. It needs a vehicle for people to pass it along or share it, discuss its merits, hash over its controversies, blog it, mash it, tweet it, and even swipe it.
Social media is a prime platform to distribute your content along with digital media, and the vehicle to get your content out to multiple platforms across the internet is thenext generation inbound marketing platform and social network, Markethive. But blockchain-driven Markethive is more than just a vehicle, it’s a place to call home when writing your content. It’s your property and cannot be confiscated.
As Markethive moves forward with its integrations, and upon joining, you receive a (CPanel), control panel, and WordPress system built into your assigned domain, a subdomain of hivesfeed.com AKA username.hivesfeed.com. This way you control all your content, without the worry or hassles of government overreach, and anti-freedom regulations designed to stifle the start-ups and the small entrepreneur. And let’s not forget digital sharecropping…
Digital sharecropping is a term coined by Nicholas Carr to describe a peculiar phenomenon of Web 2.0.
“One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few.”
In other words, anyone can create content on sites like Facebook or LinkedIn, but that content effectively belongs to the company. The more content we create for free, the more valuable the company becomes. We do the work, they reap the profit. So effectively, these companies become your landlord.
What if you moved all of your marketing to a site like Facebook? It’s local, it’s free to sign up, and it makes businesses feel like they’re doing something avant-garde.
But what happens when Facebook thinks you’ve done something that violates their terms of service and deletes your account? Or changes the way you’re allowed to talk with your customers?
“If you’re relying on Facebook or Google to bring in all of your new customers, you’re sharecropping. You’re hoping the landlord will continue to like you and support your business, but the fact is, the landlord has no idea who you are and doesn’t actually care.”
Build Assets You Can Control
Many content creators and bloggers have put millions of hours into their craft only to find it deleted and their internet presence and followers wiped out… myself included. But providing you have a safe haven to create and publish your content, then platforms like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and many more search and social sites are all superb tools to add to your marketing mix.
The thing is you will want to spend most of your time and creative energy building assets that you control.
There are three assets you should be building today and should continue to focus on for the lifetime of your online business or creative passion you want to share and continually build a following, which Markethive can help you with…
What makes Markethive different is that it’s built on a transparent blockchain system, the platform is completely decentralized delivering on our principles of privacy, transparency, autonomy, and free speech. Markethive is not spying on you, shadow banning you, or terminating accounts because of your opinions or beliefs.
Whether you’re a Trump supporter or cryptocurrency enthusiast Markethive has no hidden agendas. We are a collaborative community that wants everyone to succeed in their own right. Furthermore, with the KYC and wallet coming into play soon, fake and hacking accounts that can result in the termination of an unwitting and innocent individual along with years of their hard work, will be a thing of the past and left behind with the social media of Web 2.0.
Monetizing Your Personal Brand On The Internet
Monetizing your personal brand can take a considerable amount of time. Many aspiring bloggers and podcasters have the misconception that they can make money from their newly created blog or podcasting platform in a matter of weeks or months, but you need to build a sizable audience that cares about you and that just can’t happen overnight.
Successful people across a wide range of industries have stated it takes tenacity, persistence, and resilience and you need to adopt a three-year mindset to achieve meaningful success with your personal brand. You just establish your voice, create that content, and keep grinding it out, year after year. Eventually, if you work hard and stick with it, you can gain enough critical mass to monetize an audience. It’s not that easy.
Monetizing Your Personal Brand On Markethive
By utilizing Blockchain Technology, Markethive is able to reward the hardworking content creators by paying you for writing and publishing your blogs instantly and continuously. This is all part of the micropayment faucet system within Markethive. Additional benefits include receiving MHV Coin by your readers which adds more value to bloggers who have increased subscriber levels.
Furthermore, Markethive pays you to sign up, it pays you to use the social media platform with every post and activity you perform. It also pays you to promote it. Remember Markethive is built on the Blockchain and this is why they can pay you and offer you the security and privacy other platforms don’t. This makes it so much easier to earn an income online while furthering your influence and building your personal brand with no fear of ever having it taken away from you.
Go sign up, it is free to use all the marketing and blogging tools, get paid 500 MHV Coins on joining and enjoy the tipping feature. Yes, that’s right, we at Markethive “Tip” Instead of “Like”. It stands to reason if they tip you they like you. This is creating universal income for all entrepreneurs who are active.
By joining Markethive you build relationships with thousands of other like-minded individuals who are actively building a business, blogging, researching, building an audience and their personal brand, etc. basically being “entrepreneurs” and advancing their businesses. You can join with these people as friends, group members, and subscribers of theirs via Blog Casting, Blog Sharing, and Blog Swiping.
The Markethive Community is exploding and at the heart is a collaborative and supportive ethos that gives a real helping hand to those that are just starting out and is a treasure trove of new technology revenue-generating systems for the seasoned marketer.
Deb Williams
A Crypto/Blockchain enthusiast and a strong advocate for technology, progress, and freedom of speech. I embrace "change" with a passion and my purpose in life is to help people understand, accept, and move forward with enthusiasm to achieve their goals.
Ready or not, English is now the global language of business. More and more multinational companies are mandating English as the common corporate language—Airbus, Daimler-Chrysler, Fast Retailing, Nokia, Renault, Samsung, SAP, Technicolor, and Microsoft in Beijing, to name a few—in an attempt to facilitate communication and performance across geographically diverse functions and business endeavors.
Adopting a common mode of speech isn’t just a good idea; it’s a must, even for an American company with operations overseas, for instance, or a French company focused on domestic customers. Imagine that a group of salespeople from a company’s Paris headquarters get together for a meeting. Why would you care whether they all could speak English? Now consider that the same group goes on a sales call to a company also based in Paris, not realizing that the potential customer would be bringing in employees from other locations who didn’t speak French. This happened at one company I worked with. Sitting together in Paris, employees of those two French companies couldn’t close a deal because the people in the room couldn’t communicate. It was a shocking wake-up call, and the company soon adopted an English corporate language strategy.
Similar concerns drove Hiroshi Mikitani, the CEO of Rakuten—Japan’s largest online marketplace—to mandate in March 2010 that English would be the company’s official language of business. The company’s goal was to become the number one internet services company in the world, and Mikitani believed that the new policy—which would affect some 7,100 Japanese employees—was vital to achieving that end, especially as expansion plans were concentrated outside Japan. He also felt responsible for contributing to an expanded worldview for his country, a conservative island nation.
The multibillion-dollar company—a cross between Amazon.com and eBay—was on a growth spree: It had acquired PriceMinister.com in France, Buy.com and FreeCause in the U.S., Play.com in the UK, Tradoria in Germany, Kobo eBooks in Canada, and established joint ventures with major companies in China, Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand, and Brazil. Serious about the language change, Mikitani announced the plan to employees not in Japanese but in English. Overnight, the Japanese language cafeteria menus were replaced, as were elevator directories. And he stated that employees would have to demonstrate competence on an international English scoring system within two years—or risk demotion or even dismissal.
The media instantly picked up the story, and corporate Japan reacted with fascination and disdain. Honda’s CEO, Takanobu Ito, publicly asserted, “It’s stupid for a Japanese company to only use English in Japan when the workforce is mainly Japanese.” But Mikitani was confident that it was the right move, and the policy is bearing fruit. The English mandate has allowed Mikitani to create a remarkably diverse and powerful organization. Today, three out of six senior executives in his engineering organization aren’t Japanese; they don’t even speak Japanese. The company continues to aggressively seek the best talent from around the globe. Half of Rakuten’s Japanese employees now can adequately engage in internal communication in English, and 25% communicate in English with partners and coworkers in foreign subsidiaries on a regular basis.
Adopting a global language policy is not easy, and companies invariably stumble along the way. It’s radical, and it’s almost certain to meet with staunch resistance from employees. Many may feel at a disadvantage if their English isn’t as good as others’, team dynamics and performance can suffer, and national pride can get in the way. But to survive and thrive in a global economy, companies must overcome language barriers—and English will almost always be the common ground, at least for now.
The fastest-spreading language in human history, English is spoken at a useful level by some 1.75 billion people worldwide—that’s one in every four of us. There are close to 385 million native speakers in countries like the U.S. and Australia, about a billion fluent speakers in formerly colonized nations such as India and Nigeria, and millions of people around the world who’ve studied it as a second language. An estimated 565 million people use it on the internet.
The benefits of “Englishnization,” as Mikitani calls it, are significant; however, relatively few companies have systematically implemented an English-language policy with sustained results. Through my research and work over the past decade with companies, I’ve developed an adoption framework to guide companies in their language efforts. There’s still a lot to learn, but success stories do exist. Adopters will find significant advantages.
Why English Only?
There’s no question that unrestricted multilingualism is inefficient and can prevent important interactions from taking place and get in the way of achieving key goals. The need to tightly coordinate tasks and work with customers and partners worldwide has accelerated the move toward English as the official language of business no matter where companies are headquartered.
Three primary reasons are driving the move toward English as a corporate standard.
Competitive pressure.
If you want to buy or sell, you have to be able to communicate with a diverse range of customers, suppliers, and other business partners. If you’re lucky, they’ll share your native language—but you can’t count on it. Companies that fail to devise a language strategy are essentially limiting their growth opportunities to the markets where their language is spoken, clearly putting themselves at a disadvantage to competitors that have adopted English-only policies.
Globalization of tasks and resources.
Language differences can cause a bottleneck—a Tower of Babel, as it were—when geographically dispersed employees have to work together to meet corporate goals. An employee from Belgium may need input from an enterprise in Beirut or Mexico. Without common ground, communication will suffer. Better language comprehension gives employees more firsthand information, which is vital to good decision making. Swiss food giant Nestlé saw great efficiency improvements in purchasing and hiring thanks to its enforcement of English as a company standard.
M&A integration across national boundaries.
Negotiations regarding a merger or acquisition are complicated enough when everybody speaks the same language. But when they don’t, nuances are easily lost, even in simple e-mail exchanges. Also, cross-cultural integration is notoriously tricky; that’s why when Germany’s Hoechst and France’s Rhône-Poulenc merged in 1998 to create Aventis, the fifth largest worldwide pharmaceutical company, the new firm chose English as its operating language over French or German to avoid playing favorites. A branding element can also come into play. In the 1990s, a relatively unknown, midsize Italian appliance maker, Merloni, adopted English to further its international image, which gave it an edge when acquiring Russian and British companies.
The fastest-spreading language in human history, English is spoken at a useful level by some 1.75 billion people worldwide—that’s one in every four of us.
Obstacles to Successful English-Language Policies
To be sure, one-language policies can have repercussions that decrease efficiency. Evidence from my research at Rakuten—along with a study I conducted with Pamela Hinds of Stanford University and Catherine Cramton of George Mason University at a company I’ll call GlobalTech and a study I conducted at a firm I’ll call FrenchCo—reveals costs that global English-language rules can create. Proper rollout mitigates the risks, but even well-considered plans can encounter pitfalls. Here are some of the most common.
Change always comes as a shock.
No amount of warning and preparation can entirely prevent the psychological blow to employees when proposed change becomes reality. When Marie (all names in this article are disguised, with the exception of Mikitani and Ito) first learned of FrenchCo’s English-only policy, she was excited. She had been communicating in English with non-French partners for some time, and she saw the proposed policy as a positive sign that the company was becoming more international. That is, until she attended a routine meeting that was normally held in French. “I didn’t realize that the very first meeting after the rule came out was really going to be in English. It was a shock,” Marie says. She recalls walking into the meeting with a lot of energy—until she noticed the translator headsets.
“They’re humiliating,” she says. “I felt like an observer rather than a participant at my own company.”
Compliance is spotty.
An English mandate created a different problem for a service representative at GlobalTech. Based in Germany, the technology firm had subsidiaries worldwide. Hans, a service representative, received a frantic call from his boss when a key customer’s multimillion-dollar financial services operation ground to a halt as a result of a software glitch. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were at stake for both the customer and GlobalTech. Hans quickly placed a call to the technical department in India, but the software team was unable to jump on the problem because all communications about it were in German—despite the English-only policy instituted two years earlier requiring that all internal communications (meetings, e-mails, documents, and phone calls) be carried out in English. As Hans waited for documents to be translated, the crisis continued to escalate. Two years into the implementation, adoption was dragging.
Self-confidence erodes.
When nonnative speakers are forced to communicate in English, they can feel that their worth to the company has been diminished, regardless of their fluency level. “The most difficult thing is to have to admit that one’s value as an English speaker overshadows one’s real value,” a FrenchCo employee says. “For the past 30 years the company did not ask us to develop our foreign-language skills or offer us the opportunity to do so,” he points out. “Now, it is difficult to accept the fact that we are disqualified.” Employees facing one-language policies often worry that the best jobs will be offered only to those with strong English skills, regardless of content expertise.
When my colleagues and I interviewed 164 employees at GlobalTech two years after the company’s English-only policy had been implemented, we found that nearly 70% of employees continued to experience frustration with it. At FrenchCo, 56% of medium-fluency English speakers and 42% of low-fluency speakers reported worrying about job advancement because of their relatively limited English skills. Such feelings are common when companies merely announce the new policy and offer language classes rather than implement the shift in a systematic way. It’s worth noting that employees often underestimate their own abilities or overestimate the challenge of developing sufficient fluency.
Gauging Fluency
Job security falters.
Even though achieving sufficient fluency is possible for most, the reality is that with adoption of an English-only policy, employees’ job requirements change—sometimes overnight. That can be a bitter pill to swallow, especially among top performers. Rakuten’s Mikitani didn’t mince words with his employees: He was clear that he would demote people who didn’t develop their English proficiency.
Employees resist.
It’s not unusual to hear nonnative speakers revert to their own language at the expense of their English-speaking colleagues, often because it’s faster and easier to conduct meetings in their mother tongue. Others may take more aggressive measures to avoid speaking English, such as holding meetings at inopportune times. Employees in Asia might schedule a global meeting that falls during the middle of the night in England, for instance. In doing so, nonnative speakers shift their anxiety and loss of power to native speakers.
Many FrenchCo employees said that when they felt that their relatively poor language skills could become conspicuous and have career-related consequences, they simply stopped contributing to common discourse. “They’re afraid to make mistakes,” an HR manager at the firm explains, “so they will just not speak at all.”
In other cases, documents that are supposed to be composed in English may be written in the mother tongue—as experienced by Hans at GlobalTech—or not written at all. “It’s too hard to write in English, so I don’t do it!” one GlobalTech employee notes. “And then there’s no documentation at all.”
Performance suffers.
The bottom line takes a hit when employees stop participating in group settings. Once participation ebbs, processes fall apart. Companies miss out on new ideas that might have been generated in meetings. People don’t report costly errors or offer observations about mistakes or questionable decisions. One of the engineers at GlobalTech’s Indian office explained that when meetings reverted into German his ability to contribute was cut off. He lost important information—particularly in side exchanges—despite receiving meeting notes afterward. Often those quick asides contained important contextual information, background analyses, or hypotheses about the root cause of a particular problem. He neither participated in the meetings nor learned from the problem-solving discussions.
An Adoption Framework
Converting the primary language of a business is no small task. In my work I’ve developed a framework for assessing readiness and guidelines for adopting the shift. Adoption depends on two key factors: employee buy-in and belief in capacity. Buy-in is the degree to which employees believe that a single language will produce benefits for them or the organization. Belief in their own capacity is the extent to which they are confident that they can gain enough fluency to pass muster.
The two dimensions combine to produce four categories of response to the change, as shown in the matrix “Four Types of Employee Response.” Ideally, employees would fall in what I call the “inspired” category—those who are excited about the move and confident that they can make the shift. They’re optimistic and likely to embrace the challenge. But undoubtedly, some employees will feel “oppressed.” Those people don’t think the change is a good idea, and they don’t think they’ll cut it.
The reality is that without buy-in, employees won’t bother to brush up their language; without belief, they’ll lose hope. I’ve identified some guidelines managers can follow to help people along. Rakuten’s Mikitani has successfully implemented a version of this framework.
Leaders and managers can help employees move from one box to another more easily than you might expect. There are fairly simple strategies that aid the shift, typically involving some combination of a strong psychological boost and practical training. To shift employees from “frustrated” to “inspired,” for instance, managers must offer constant encouragement and an array of language-development opportunities. To shift employees from “indifferent” to “inspired,” managers must work on improving buy-in—once these employees feel invested in the change, their skills will follow.
Improving belief in capacity.
Managers can use four strategies to help people boost their belief in their ability to develop language proficiency.
Offer opportunities to gain experience with language.
Whether through education, employment, or living abroad, experience tends to give people the confidence they need to succeed in this task. You can’t change past experience, but you can provide opportunities, such as overseas language training and job rotations, that open new doors and allow employees to stretch their skills. Rakuten has sent senior executives to English-speaking countries like the UK and the U.S. for full language immersion training. Employees have also been offered weeks-long language-training programs in the Philippines. Although not easily scalable to 7,100 Japanese employees, the programs successfully produced individuals with functional English skills. Rakuten also plans to send more than 1,000 engineers to technology conferences outside Japan.
Foster positive attitudes.
Attitudes are contagious: People’s faith in their own capabilities grows when they see others around them—peers, managers, friends—having positive experiences with the radical change. The reverse is also true, unfortunately. Managers can model good risk-taking behaviors by showing that they too are trying new things, making mistakes, and learning from those mistakes.
Mikitani focused his personal attention on middle managers because he knew that collectively they could influence thousands of employees. He encouraged them to constantly improve their own language skills and even offered to teach them English himself if need be. (Nobody took him up on the offer.) He also encouraged managers to support their subordinates in their efforts to develop their language proficiency.
Use verbal persuasion.
Encouragement and positive reinforcement from managers and executives—simple statements like “You can do it” or “I believe in you”—make all the difference. To mitigate turnover threats at Rakuten, managers identified talent that the company wanted to retain and tailored special programs for them, all the while cheering them on. Also, Mikitani repeatedly assured his entire workforce that he would do everything in his power to help every employee meet his or her English-proficiency goals. He made it clear that he believes that with effort everyone can adequately learn the language of business and that he did not want to see anyone leave the company because of the English-only policy.
Encourage good study habits.
Companies need to contract with language vendors who specialize in helping employees at various levels of proficiency. The vendors need to be intimately familiar with the company context so that they can guide employees’ learning, from how best to allocate their time in improving skills to strategies for composing e-mails in English. Rakuten considers language development to be part of every job and grants people time during the workday to devote to it. Every morning, employees can be seen flipping through their study books in the company’s cafeteria or navigating their e-learning portals.
Improving employee buy-in.
Shifts in buy-in call for different measures. But they don’t operate in isolation: Buy-in and belief go together. Strategies that can help people feel more confident include:
Messaging, messaging, and more messaging.
Continual communication from the CEO, executives, and managers is critical. Leaders should stress the importance of globalization in achieving the company’s mission and strategy and demonstrate how language supports that. At Rakuten, Mikitani signaled the importance of the English-language policy to his entire organization relentlessly. For instance, each week some 120 managers would submit their business reports, and he would reply to each of them pushing them to develop their language skills. I surveyed employees before and after Rakuten implemented the adoption framework. Results indicated a dramatic increase in buy-in after Mikitani showed his employees that he was “obsessed and committed to Englishnization,” as he put it. The vast majority of the employees surveyed said that the policy was a “necessary” move.
Encouragement from managers and executives—simple statements like “You can do it” or “I believe in you”—make all the difference.
Internal marketing.
Because a language transformation is a multiyear process whose complexity far exceeds most other change efforts, it is crucial to maintain employee buy-in over time. At Rakuten, the now-English intranet regularly features employee success stories with emphasis on best practices for increasing language competence. Companywide meetings are also held monthly to discuss the English-language policy.
Branding.
Managers should encourage people to self-identify as global rather than local employees. It’s difficult to develop a global identity with limited exposure to an international environment, of course. Rakuten tackled this challenge by instituting an enterprisewide social network to promote cross-national interactions. Employees now interact and engage with colleagues worldwide through the company’s social networking site.Adopting a universal English policy is not the end of leadership challenges posed by global communication. Using English as a business language can damage employee morale, create unhealthy divides between native and nonnative speakers, and decrease the overall productivity of team members. Leaders must avoid and soften these potential pitfalls by building an environment in which employees can embrace a global English policy with relative ease. In this way, companies can improve communication and collaboration.
When I asked Mikitani what advice he’d give other CEOs when it comes to enforcing a one-language mandate, he was emphatic about discipline. CEOs need to be role models: If they don’t stick to the program, nobody else will. Mikitani even holds one-on-one performance reviews with his top Japanese executives in English. “If you forgive a little,” he says, “you’ll give up everything.”
Mikitani doesn’t fear resistance. He believes, as I do, that you can counteract it—and ultimately bring about significant transformation in employees’ beliefs and buy-in. A global language change takes perseverance and time, but if you want to surpass your rivals, it’s no longer a matter of choice.
Tsedal Neeley is the Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration in the Organizational Behavior Unit at Harvard Business School and the founder of the consulting firm Global Matters. She is the author of The Language of Global Success. Twitter: @tsedal
Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.
Ban Anything That Upsets The Status Quo
Over the last few years, YouTube has made headlines with its incessant banning of videos and de-platforming of influencers’ accounts causing loss of income and online presence. Last year, Youtube de-platformed a myriad of ‘alt-right’ and so-called ‘conspiracy’ groups and removed these channels from the video streaming site.
Youtube also started targeting cryptocurrency content creators and YouTubers who operated channels that discussed bitcoin and other digital assets. In late 2019, YouTube officials removed a massive number of cryptocurrency video channels for very little reasoning. The company typically just tells the person that the channel had “violated community guidelines.”
This week Bitcoin.com was also censored for sharing a video about their bitcoin mining pool. Bitcoin.com’s YouTube account was given one strike for allegedly “violating community guidelines”. This begs the question, “Who or what consists of their so-called community?”
When YouTube, the online video-sharing platform first started back in 2005, it was a community of people sharing ideas and fun videos with very little moderation and censorship. Now it’s looking more like the Ministry of Propaganda. For the last three months, YouTube, now under the ownership of Google, has taken part in historic amounts of censorship regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. YouTube CEO, Susan Wojcicki said that any videos that were in opposition to the World Health Organization (WHO) narrative of the COVID-19 outbreak would be removed.
Subsequently, Wojcicki’s ruling was carried out as many videos were banned that portrayed another opinion or fact that went against the WHO narrative regarding the ‘official’ coronavirus data. YouTube and Wojcicki decided to shelter the public from progressive ideas and data that just may have some truth in them because it went against the authorities.
Since the beginning of this virus and the panic it has caused, we now have proof as more research is taking place from many respected scientific think tanks, and epidemiologists are now trying to tell the public that the lockdowns were very irrational.
Despite the proof, Youtube has banned a number of videos that go against the ongoing fear-mongering narrative. When a video was posted on Youtube that featured Dr. Daniel W. Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi from California, the video got 5 million views before it was removed.
Youtube also banned a video called “Plandemic,” which featured Dr. Judy Mikovits soon after it was published on the online video sharing platform. Youtube, however, does allow videos that rebut Judy Mikovits, Daniel W. Erickson, and Dr. Artin Massihi’s narratives. The company has no issues allowing rebuttals that stay on course with the fear-mongering narrative.
Whatever the veracity of the doctors’ claims, YouTube’s censorship of unorthodox ideas in the name of protecting the public from misinformation is misguided and counter-productive. Sheltering the public from ideas, even bad ones, only makes society more susceptible to dangerous error. Knowledge is power and surely we should be able to think for ourselves and have the ability to investigate.
Across social media, censors have been racing to limit the flow of information that questions these new laws imposed. Facebook also conceded it had been working with state governments in California, New Jersey, and Nebraska to remove pages for anti-stay-at-home protests events that are popping up all over the platform.
Ron Coleman, a prominent First Amendment lawyer said in a recent interview.
“It’s the kind of totalitarian thinking and conduct that has cost millions of lives in recent world history. The fact that it’s being done by private companies and not government doesn’t change that.”
The former head of biostatistics, epidemiology, and research design at Rockefeller University, Dr. Knut M. Wittkowski, recently told the public that Youtube had banned his video that went against the lockdown, and over-reaction narrative after it gathered more than 1.3 million views.
Wittkowski, who holds two doctorates in computer science and medical biometry, believes the coronavirus should be allowed to create “herd immunity,” and that short of a vaccine, the pandemic will only end after it has sufficiently spread through the population.
“With all respiratory diseases, the only thing that stops the disease is herd immunity. About 80% of the people need to have had contact with the virus, and the majority of them won’t even have recognized that they were infected,” he says in the now-deleted video.
Wittkowski told The Post, saying he had no idea why it was removed.
“I was just explaining what we had…They don’t tell you. They just say it violates our community standards. There’s no explanation for what those standards are or what standards it violated.”
Dr. Andrew Kaufman’s videos were also removed when he spoke out against the stay-at-home narrative and the data spread by people like the epidemiologist Neil Ferguson dubbed Professor Lockdown who broke his own rule after convincing Prime Minister of the U.K. Boris Johnston to enforce the stay at home rule.
YouTube’s Latest Target
Now Youtube has banned one of Bitcoin.com’s videos for sharing information about their mining pool. The video removal was based on the company’s “sale of regulated goods” policy and the video allegedly went against “community guidelines.”
The Bitcoin.com account was given a single strike, which gives the account a one week probation period. Two to three strikes could lead to far worse restrictions against the Bitcoin.com account that merely shares information and resources about cryptocurrency solutions.
Bitcoin.com’s CEO Mate Tokay has spoken out against the Youtube censorship in a tweet letting the company and Wojcicki know they have been immoral, irrational, and illogical.
Censorship tends to manipulate reality and it has engendered evil numerous times over the course of history. Social media platforms are private companies and they can impose any restrictions they choose, but what they choose to censor seems to be agenda-driven and in line with the status quo of authoritarianism.
Critical Thinking Not Allowed
YouTube seems to ban videos that allow for critical thinking. Cryptocurrency is one sector that gains grassroots attention and makes people think critically. Censorship and the fact they allow fake news and propaganda certainly unveil the true colors of YouTube that it just may not have the best interests of the global community in mind.
YouTube has banned videos that question the ‘official’ COVID-19 statistics because people are now realizing that a virus with a 99% survival rate isn’t as devastating as we first thought. As they scurry to remove the videos as soon as they emerge, it’s too little too late as millions have already seen them and the information that may just deliver a different point of view or perhaps even the truth.
As FEE.org explains,“Youtube’s censorship of dissenting doctors will backfire.” By taking down the videos, YouTube has limited the extent to which that social learning can happen and insulated the error from debunking. If anything, YouTube’s censorship has lent additional credence to whatever mistakes they made by feeding into the narrative that the powers-that-be fear its truth. The debunking is being drowned out by outrage over the censorship. And the Streisand Effect (how censorship can boost something’s publicity) is causing it to spread even more.
As more people realize and get sick and tired of the tech giants’ antics the more they will migrate to other platforms that do want to genuinely help people understand and change the world, giving back freedom of choice and allowing citizens to think for themselves. Once upon a time, there was nowhere else to go but now things are changing.
Image credit: observatory.tec
Markethive Encourages Critical Thinking
We have a future here where we can operate on a platform of decentralized data, a platform that advocates self-sovereignty. Markethive is a next-generation Social Market Network, built on the Blockchain that has positioned itself as a complete ecosystem for Entrepreneurs.
Incorporating its cryptocurrency consumer coin (MHV), it provides prosperous solutions for all business owners, marketers, commercial artists, etc, who require an online presence ensuring privacy, and autonomy along with no measures in place to ban you, terminate your account or censor your content.
Markethive's foundation is built upon integrity, transparency, and autonomy. As we live in a not so perfect world, there is always negativity, topics, and opinions that individuals may not agree with or even find offensive. You will have the ability to filter your newsfeed and block any, what you consider, unsavory characters, or content, remembering your newsfeed is your property. There are no corporate officials deciding for you. That gives people the right and freedom to choose for themselves who they wish to communicate with what they wish to see. There is a saying “Live And Let Live” and I consider these wise words.
Markethive’s Design And Vision
Markethive is a decentralized, autonomous, fluid environment which includes manifestations of intellectual achievements, social habits, innovation, music, literature, technology, commerce, and the arts. A central “hub” built using blockchain technology, is designed to encourage “reciprocal interchange” of ideas, knowledge, or skills as well as providing for exchange, sales or purchases of goods, services, and commodities.
This premier hybrid social network includes news feeds, blogging platforms, video channels, chat channels, groups, image sharing, link hubs, resume, profile page, with additional platforms for ecommerce and digital news site.
But more than a social network, Markethive has also delivered “Inbound Marketing tools” like broadcasting, capture pages, lead funnels, autoresponders, self-replicating group tools, traffic analytics, CMS, and more. This is provided for free to you and what’s more, you are paid for learning and using the platform. Markethive’s focus is on the rights of the people and providing a user-friendly, rewarding solution that is so much in need of right now.
Markethive Is About To Start Its Engines
Markethive is in BETA at the moment as engineers are working tirelessly to implement all facets of this monumental system that caters to the entire worldwide market of entrepreneurs. That includes small businesses, local businesses, regional businesses, global businesses, cottage industries, real estate agents, mortgage brokers, insurance agents, affiliate marketers, software innovators, musicians, churches, political platforms, political candidates, distributors, network marketers, innovators, and dreamers!
The engine power that Markethive has will make this a goliath in social media, inbound marketing, cryptocurrency, ecommerce, and digital media distribution.
Many systems within the platform are up and running now and as we near the completion of the Markethive wallet we are continuously growing as more people become aware of who and what we are and stand for. Intrinsically, Markethive gives the power back to the people. It has been built for the people, by the people and is of the people. We will reach that moment when the whole world will notice as we rise up as a giant voice of the ENTREPRENEUR!
Deb Williams
A Crypto/Blockchain enthusiast and a strong advocate for technology, progress, and freedom of speech. I embrace "change" with a passion and my purpose in life is to help people understand, accept, and move forward with enthusiasm to achieve their goals.
A BLOCKCHAIN-ENABLED FUTURE
Empowerment Autonomous Trustless
Blockchain technology is becoming a tidal wave of innovation and practical blockchain applications are becoming more mainstream. It’s moving beyond the hype of a couple of years ago and now bearing fruit, bringing real benefits to individuals and organizations.
Blockchain can be a tricky concept to get your head around, but to put it simply it is a tool that offers industries the ability to increase productivity and revenue, cut costs, ensure transparency and reduce wasted time and paperwork. It’s a new foundation underpinning our everyday tasks.
The pivotal advantage of blockchain is that there is no central hub. It has the transparency of a distributed ledger combined with the cryptographic security of an immutable data chain that makes this technology an ideal instrument for any business to exchange and validate information. Blockchain is a baseline technology that can be configured in various ways to suit different purposes and accommodate individual businesses across the board.
The Business Value With Blockchain
There are a few key areas where blockchain can add value to businesses and individuals,
Cost Reduction
Businesses no longer have to pour profits into logistics, intermediaries, and administrative paper trails. The blockchain can streamline supply chains, cutting out the middleman and banishing processes that slow efficiency and eat profits.
Revenue Creation
The blockchain does away with administrative and collaborative boundaries, allowing for innovative strategies that simply weren’t viable before the advent of Blockchain technology. This is a new freedom, where distributed ledgers and cryptography pave the way for new infrastructure and revenue models.
Consumer Impact
New business models provide the opportunity to meet the previously overlooked needs of consumers and communities. In the medical field, for example, where remote patient care and record-keeping may have been an issue in the past, blockchain advances provide ways to overcome those barriers using synchronized records and smart care devices on the network.
Freedom And Equality
Entrepreneurs, writers, and all types of creative artists are able to attain recognition, financial sovereignty, data privacy, and autonomy now that Blockchain has been utilized and is what drives the next generation social market network. Working online is at an all-time high and with the rise in social media and online marketing activity, blockchain makes it more equitable bringing true freedom for the individual.
Blockchain Disruption
Blockchain is already making waves in financial services, tech companies, healthcare, social market network, and digital media. Below are two infographics from Visual Capitalist that were inspired by a McKinsey study researching a combined industry analysis with more than 90 distinct use cases.
The Problem with Centralized Infrastructure
Today on the Internet, we must constantly trust one another with sensitive data, transactions, and records. Most of our interactions on the Internet run on centralized web servers, and massive amounts of user data often exist in a single database. Current databases are designed to be controlled by “trusted” admins who can read, alter, block, and even delete data. The centralized architecture of the Internet today is not only inefficient but vulnerable to censorship and targeted attacks by both hackers and internal bad actors.
The Value of Decentralization
The decentralized architecture of a blockchain is a global network of computers simultaneously running the software and validating the chain of transactions is what ensures that the transaction record is never compromised. Decentralization is critical as an architectural principle. It makes a blockchain network less likely to fail, harder to attack, and harder for bad actors to game the system.
As blockchain adoption spreads, it can become a driving force for promoting equitable societies, solving complex economic issues, and transforming how we live and work every day.
Two Practical Applications Of Blockchain
1. Smart Contracts Blockchain and smart contract technologies function well in instances where legal contracts are required to maintain ownership rights and data privacy laws. These customizable, self-executing smart contracts on the blockchain can be easily managed by all parties. Smart contracts allow the decentralization of trustless transactions, worldwide and on a large scale. These can encompass different kinds of interaction, not only human-to-human but also human-to-machine and machine-to-machine.
Issues with ownership rights and royalties are commonplace within the entertainment industry. To navigate these issues, blockchain technology offers an unchangeable, traceable, real-time distribution, and reporting network for all involved. Ujomusic is one such application that is helping artists track their royalties worldwide. In the music industry, blockchain technology can bring artists and fans closer together, allowing listeners to pay micropayments to artists for listening to their songs directly.
Artists are not always paid in a reasonable time by major players who control the music industry, sometimes even waiting years to receive their earning for their work. By utilizing smart contracts, artists and studios can ensure that intellectual property agreements are met by other parties and smart contracts could be implemented that instantly pay artists once certain requirements are met.
Image credit Disruptor Daily
Data privacy issues, massive scale surveillance, also known as dataveillance and lack of freedom of speech in the social media realm have become a distinct problem. Markethive, a social media, and inbound marketing platform have not only addressed these issues to empower the individual, but it has also utilized smart contract technology.
This is in the form of the Markethive Coin (MHV) which is a fungible cryptocurrency consumer coin, and the Incentivized Loan Program (ILP – Smart Contract). This enables all users to generate an income by just using the platform and the first-mover advantage of share acquisitions consisting of 20% of the company’s net revenue. Markethive is a collaborative decentralized platform where its Entrepreneurial members can achieve viability and self-sovereignty.
The Framework Of A Smart Contract
Smart contracts help you exchange money, property, shares, or anything of value in a transparent, conflict-free way while avoiding the services of a middleman. Built upon the blockchain, a smart contract is usually:
Pre-written logic in the form of computer code
Stored and replicated on the blockchain
Executed and run by the network of computers running the blockchain
Can result in updates to accounts on the ledger (i.e. payment for an executed contract)
Using the Ethereum platform, smart contracts can be programmed using basic logic. On the most basic level, they can:
Perform calculations (i.e. calculating interest)
Store information (i.e. membership records)
Send transactions to other accounts (i.e. payment for a good or service)
But most importantly, it is important to know that smart contracts are autonomous. They are not controlled by anyone – instead, they self-execute based on a set of instructions that two parties have agreed to, which is the code.
Image credit Visual Capitalist
Benefits of Smart Contracts
Smart contracts are appealing for a variety of reasons:
Autonomy: There is no need to rely on third parties, which could be biased or not have your interests at heart.
Trust: Your documents are encrypted on a shared ledger, and all parties can have access to them.
Redundancy: Documents are duplicated many times over on the blockchain, and can’t ever be “lost”.
Safety: Documents are encrypted, making them near-impenetrable by hackers.
Speed: These contracts automatically self-execute, saving you precious time.
Savings: Smart contracts save you money by taking out the middleman.
Precision: Smart contracts execute the exact code provided, ensuring zero errors.
Transparency: For organizations like governments, they could add another level of transparency to dealings. Blockchain technology can set up a decentralized system that prevents any form of voting fraud or suspicious movements in the network.
The blockchain is already a disruptive technology, and with these benefits, the potentiality of smart contracts is an amazing step forward for fairer, faster, more lucrative, and trustworthy systems for the companies, organizations, and individuals who embrace it.
2. Digital IDs Reportedly, over 1.1 billion people worldwide still have no way to prove their identity according to the World Bank. Simultaneously, companies and financial institutions in both traditional and digital markets are being required to follow more stringent know-your-customer (KYC) initiatives.
Despite this, many providers are still not sufficiently meeting these standards; to further complicate things, regulations vary widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Markethive have migrated to the blockchain to securely and privately verify users.
Blockchain’s multi-factor verification process eclipses the levels of security that traditional password protection offers. Identities are secured for the decentralized web, for example, data sharing by third party companies has resulted in intrusive advertising. Blockchain-based identification means that no third parties can access your personal data without your consent.
The thing to be aware of is companies and platforms that claim to be blockchain-based but have a centralized identification protocol. There will be resistance from these entities that profit from the current system where people have no control over their personal data. Big companies manipulate data, so they are not very interested in decentralizing that type of information.
The existence of blockchain-based, yet centralized ID platforms could cause confusion among organizations and the general public. However, it's likely that the advantages of the best decentralized platforms possessing enough reach will inevitably make themselves known to the masses, so that eventually a few dominant platforms will emerge. As we move forward the majority will realize the advantages of a completely decentralized system that offers security, transparency, privacy, and gives control back to the users.
Image credit Disruptor Daily
Conclusion
The world is waking up to the impressive capabilities of the blockchain. As a foundational technology that anything can be developed and augmented on top of it, the potential applications of the blockchain go way beyond just payments or cryptocurrencies. In fact, the blockchain will revolutionize how we interact with intellectual property, capital markets, insurance, healthcare, government, social media, and internet marketing, along with many other sectors.
Forward-looking companies that convert to the blockchain to improve the privacy and security of their data and create an environment that is unfettered from political and nefarious agendas, will be the winners on top.
Just about every company that migrates to the blockchain and new companies launched built upon the blockchain, will prosper, as long as they deliver and make their prime agenda to benefit their customers.
Deb Williams
A Crypto/Blockchain enthusiast and a strong advocate for technology, progress, and freedom of speech. I embrace "change" with a passion and my purpose in life is to help people understand, accept, and move forward with enthusiasm to achieve their goals.
Markethive is a mighty light on the mountain attracting the multitudes, the millions into our city to prepare for financial sovereignty, and be free in this world of suppression and authoritarianism. The next-generation market network is expanding daily as more and more people see the magnificent vision as Markethive progresses with the many integrations, various platforms, and money-making systems that make up the complete ecosystem for entrepreneurs.
The Two Primary Engines
Markethive has two engines driving it and working simultaneously bringing millions of entrepreneurs into this safe haven which is the central hub and gateway to the internet universe. Social media and online marketing platforms or digital media sites typically only have one engine. LinkedIn, for example, only has a subscriber engine meaning they get their traffic through people subscribing to them so basically you have to log in to LinkedIn to see their platform. CoinTelegraph, a high profile digital media site, is predominantly a traffic engine.
Both the subscriber and traffic engines’ speed and power are measured by Alexa and WorthOfWeb and in the case of Markethive, they are growing daily in an exponential fashion. Just to give you an idea the infographic below shows how Markethive has grown in the last 2 years. It consists of a combination of internal and external statistics:
On the left is Markethive’s traffic engine where it shows 28% of traffic is coming through external referral sites which is incredible numbers. 7% search traffic and 3% social traffic is very significant along with 62% direct traffic that is coming from the subscriber engine. So the growth rate of Markethive since 2017 is a whopping 2,849%.
On the right are the current statistics of the subscriber engine with the members’ growth in the last 6 months now tipping 90.8K. New subscribers in the last month are up by 227%. These are all validated accounts as Markethive has negated any issues of individual members creating numerous accounts. It delivers real people into the system using OAuth, KYC, and SMS.
These numbers are not static, they are always increasing but this infographic is a good indication and illustration of both engines.
Markethive is now present in every country worldwide, in every nation with people from every race, creed, age group, professional and personal interests. With all the spectrums of all the things that many platforms use to divide us Markethive is using to unite us because what we all have in common in Markethive is liberty, freedom, economic sovereignty, and entrepreneurialism. That is our common, binding factor and is very powerful. Markethive is rising to become the world leader for entrepreneurs of every language, every religion, and every kingdom and nation.
The Markethive Reach is currently at 12.9 Million Monthly unique visitors. 64.9 Million monthly page views. Our social following is at 63.2 K and Markethive subscribers at 90.8 K and growing daily.
An Engine Within The Engine
Through our social network and blogging platform, we connect with entrepreneurs, techies, crypto nerds, artists, innovators, musicians, and business professionals, both subscribers, and traffic. Below are just a few social networks (there are many more) Markethive has integrated enabling automatic subscribing and sharing and as we grow, this will create a reach into the billions. For example, If only 42% of 10 million with an average of 5000 followers subscribe to your blog, that equates to 21 billion people that you have reached and are able to read your blog. What a great engine to have within an engine! It’s coming alive with tremendous power.
The Next Stage Will Evoke More Growth
The Apprentice Program, which is an entry-level membership will be launching soon at a very low cost allowing members to benefit from a matching bonus airdrop of 100 MHV for the first three referrals they bring into Markethive. The Apprentice membership will also be able to buy and resell banner impressions from the Entrepreneur One members, which really accelerates the cottage industry process.
The Apprentice and Journeyman upgrades are not money machines per se, but they do contain benefits that will become more clear to you, closer to the roll-out of these memberships. Another benefit being considered is that 50% of the price of these upgrades can be paid in MHV, and the other 50% to be paid via CC or PayPal at launch. This next stage will cause Markethive’s growth to explode even more.
Money Machines And Strategies To Reach Our Audience
CPM Display
Right now we have the banners and the Banner Impressions Exchange (BIX) is part of that and projected to be delivered on May 15, 2020. Banners are still a very good source of advertising in the online world and the banners are displayed across the many domains Markethive has, resulting in maximum exposure.
Social Newsfeed Boost
This is the only form of advertising on LinkedIn and Twitter. Unlike Markethive they don’t have banner ads or video ads, it’s all done through their newsfeed. It is a great way to market to a social media audience, and Markethive will be integrating this with the expected release in the 2nd quarter of 2020.
Newsletter Sponsorship
Markethive is an inbound marketing and digital media platform and it is also a subscription-based social network. All members have validated email and phone numbers so this is a very effective way to raise brand a product awareness among the global subscribers. This is more expensive for people to utilize, however, Markethive is able to offer this as just another way to market your brand. Development is forecast to begin the 2nd quarter of 2020.
Press Release
Markethive receives large traffic to its many sites along with major followers in all social media accounts and also delivers a WordPress Plugin that allows members to publish from Markethive to their WP sites and beyond. The Markethive press release system publishes to 1,700+ news sites, our social followers, all Markethive’s heavily trafficked sites, and to 15,000+ members’ WP sites. Development is forecast to begin in the 2nd quarter of 2020.
Sponsored Articles
Sponsored articles are very similar to the Press Release service but instead of an announcement the Press release delivers, it can be an article to bring awareness on any brand, topic, news, or otherwise, you care to share. Markethive is a digital media publishing platform where many writers and bloggers, as well as Markethive’s own writing staff, publish their content creating a following, thereby attracting traffic These articles are published to Markethive front pages, broadcasted to the Markethive social networks and Word Press distribution. This makes Markethive thousand times more powerful than other news sites and platforms.
Gamified Video Advertising
Markethive makes video advertising compelling, effective, and well distributed. Your sponsored video will randomly float across the members’ dashboard on Markethive. If a member catches and watches the video until the end, they will be rewarded with MHV coins and prizes. Gamification and rewards for watching the videos and also perks for responding and sharing to their social networks do inspire people to participate making it fun and rewarding for all.
The BIX Exchange. The 1st Of Many Money Machines And Another Engine
MHV To Become A Very Popular Currency
The Markethive Coin will be listed on a number of exchanges where positive relationships are currently being established. Yobit.net is most likely to be the first one that MHV will be listed, so go there and open an account, get familiar with the site, see the trading activity of a multitude of other coins and be ready for the next step on your journey with Markethive. The site gives away free coins along with games to earn more coins.
The Markethive Coin (MHV) will also be offered for free on Yobit and upon clicking to get the free coins they will need to subscribe to Markethive where they will receive the MHV airdrop as well.
But, before we go full throttle, Markethive will have several ways to utilize MHV ensuring its increase in value including building relationships with the various digital media sites integrating API plugins where MHV can be used to advertise, thereby creating a market place outside of the Markethive ecosystem that accepts our coin.
This is just the first layer, the tip of the iceberg of Markethive’s vision and plans. The more money machines we produce, the more security and financial sovereignty we spread, the more uses for our coin. Ultimately, MHV will be the only transactor or form of payment for any of the services and products Markethive or the entrepreneurs within Markethive offer.
Although everyone will be able to earn MHV on the Markethive platform continuously, there will always be the option to buy the coin from the exchanges and bring it in and utilize it for the services which are legitimate and highly sought after in the online world of business and marketing.
What Does The Markethive Audience Consist Of?
It’s entrepreneurs, a very powerful, vertical audience. They are people that are looking for the services that the majority of the people on the internet sell. Training, ebooks, live mentoring, software enhancements, SEO services, and tracking, etc. So essentially we are producing this tremendous target for 3rd party advertisers to want to advertise on the Markethive platform and related domains.
No other system out there utilizes their coin that they produce to pay for advertising on their platform. They only accept other coins as a form of payment. Markethive will be the first and one where other sites and forums will take an interest in by implementing API’s to be able to transact with MHV across various platforms.
MHV will become very popular because it represents a vertical, unique set of engines, a traffic engine, and a subscriber engine and Markethive subscribers are the world’s entrepreneurs. So we accumulate, hold, and spend, then let the free market do the rest and watch the Markethive Consumer Coin increase in value.
As CEO, Founder, and Visionary, Thomas Prendergast says,
“The true value of the coin will become apparent when we are listed in a real exchange like Yobit, Binance, Kraken, and the wallets are in place. But I can tell you no other coin has the magnitude of use and demand for real-world services. No other coin has as big a community like us. No other coin has nearly the traffic we have.”
Conclusion
No other social, marketing, or digital media company has incorporated Blockchain technology, with its own financial economy along with every tool and portal imaginable to make Markethive an all-encompassing system that entrepreneurs and companies overall et al, will embrace when they see its power.
Markethive is delivering a ‘state of the art platform’ to you, but it is your company. It’s been built for the community and brings self-sovereignty, privacy, autonomy to every individual with a genuine opportunity to be in control of your future, peace of mind, fulfilling your potential, creating wealth, and able to prosper in so many ways.
With its two main engines at the helm and secondary engines such as the MHV coin and exchange as well as all cottage businesses within Markethive reaching out to all other platforms is fundamentally the core, the epicenter where we all work in collaboration ensuring everyone’s success. Markethive is its name, Entrepreneurialism is its game.
Deb Williams
A Crypto/Blockchain enthusiast and a strong advocate for technology, progress, and freedom of speech. I embrace "change" with a passion and my purpose in life is to help people understand, accept, and move forward with enthusiasm to achieve their goals.
The Answer To Working From Home In The Current World Of New Normal
Working from home is looking to be a real positive as we move forward with the disruptive forces of the COVID-19 pandemic. In countries where the bell curve is starting to flatten, plans of reopening businesses are being discussed although social distancing measures are still enforced. Schools, planes, cinemas, everywhere that have seating in close proximity is being redesigned to cater in the aftermath of this unprecedented catastrophe and it’s looking like this will be with us for the foreseeable future and maybe even beyond. The golden age of socialization is over, now being replaced with an ever-cautionary way of living.
There are 3,389,979 confirmed cases worldwide with more than 1,124,676 United States citizens who have been infected with the coronavirus and at least 65,510 have died according to worldometer.info. More than 1,000 additional deaths have been announced on a daily basis since April 2nd in the U.S.alone.
As the spread of the virus continues, political leaders seek to reopen parts of the country. The economic effect is overwhelming, unemployment claims have spiked and people are starting to feel the negative psychological effects of isolation. Life has been fundamentally reordered because of this virus and although portions of the country begin to reopen, health officials have warned the return of communal events and socializing would come in stages as the virus could surge again with a new wave in the months ahead.
Ballooning unemployment has been the result of this pandemic causing a deep recession. Historically, in any other recession we’ve had in the past, unemployment has been an issue but at a slower pace. This time we have reached record highs in only 2 months and it is being reported it will take a long time to recover.
To Work Or Not To Work
America’s flight crew of various airlines has also reacted to the risky situation of the lack of COVID-19 protocol and restrictions. Although major airlines are allowing passengers to do some seat switching to help with social distancing, passengers are not required to wear masks or stay 6 feet away from each other. This has prompted a call from the union of flight attendants to the Department of Transportation, in coordination with the Department of Health and Human Services, to “end all leisure travel until the virus is contained”.
There has been widespread anxiety among workers in the United States about returning to work as some states attempt to begin the long and tedious process of recommencing economic enterprise at this stage of the pandemic, a survey reveals.
According to a survey conducted by Fishbowl, An overall 81% of workers that took the survey from across the U.S. indicated that they would not feel safe if their state were to reopen now. The survey was answered by 19,689 verified professionals on the Fishbowl app from across the U.S. and included employees at companies such as EY, Deloitte, Accenture, Amazon, Edelman, Nike, Google, KPMG, and thousands of others.
Given that New York is the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak in the states, it’s not surprising that the state recorded the highest percentage of 85.35% suffering from the anxiety of returning to work right now, with only 14.64% said that they would feel safe returning to work.
Previous Fishbowl surveys have revealed that 54 percent of workers fear layoffs at their companies as a deep recession grips the country. Nationwide, at least 26 million people have lost their jobs in the U.S. over the last month.
Profound Psychological Change
There has also been a considerable demand for homes in rural areas as people react to the pandemic, wanting to relocate from the dense urban areas to a more virus-free country location.
It has been reported that there seems to be a discerning psychological about-face as people are more interested in buying a house at the foot of the mountains and that’s a complete flip from the demand where everyone wanted to live in the city that has been the trend for a very long time.
So how does that fit in on the job front? Even before the Coronavirus pandemic hit, work from home businesses and the remote job market was increasing as more and more people are seeking a more flexible lifestyle allowing them to work from home. Due to the restrictions brought about by COVID-19 lockdown, companies are increasingly asking employees to work from home, but there are many who have lost their job entirely or laid off as a result of the pandemic.
New Opportunities
Thanks to the technology of social media we can all stay connected virtually, and it also opens up many opportunities for either remote employment or starting your own business from home. The possibilities are many in the online sphere, in fields such as IT and computer, freelance, content creators creative arts, customer service, education, translation, sales, and marketing, and there are many more being created as we enter into this new normal world.
Image source, Getty
The Next Generation
Now we have the next-generation approach to working online and completely facilitating your own business on a platform that caters to e-commerce, creative artists, marketers, entrepreneurs, in fact, anything that comes to mind. This visionary company, Markethive is the perfect springboard to anything you choose to do. In and of itself you can earn an income as you are paid to be active on the site by just referring three people to join you.
Markethive has incorporated Blockchain Technology meaning it has its own ecosystem with the Markethive Coin which is distributed continuously. So just using the platform you will accumulate the cryptocurrency and are able to purchase goods and services. Blockchain Technology and the cryptocurrency sphere has enabled Markethive to align itself with the users’ need and right to be in control of their data and how they use their time to monetize their efforts. As we move forward with the launch of the Markethive Wallet App and coin exchanges the MHV coin will then provide liquidity.
So what we have here is a money-making platform where you can showcase your talents on a social media interface to a multitude of like-minded entrepreneurs. Markethive also delivers the reach across the internet. The ability to register and assign your many social networks into the Markethive system produces the reach into the literal billions. This is the epicenter of all things linear. Below the comparison chart that illustrates Markethive has integrated everything needed for successful marketing and business practice, increasing your brand exposure, and generating an income.
In a nutshell, Markethive is a multi-dimensional, deep level linking dynamics, social organizational integrated system. Integrating Vast Social networks reaches, internal social network connections, unlimited interconnected WordPress blogs, the vast API news sites like NBC, Wired Magazine, Bloomberg, Western journal, Mashable and 1000s of other news sites, that continue to expand due to the power of your own Markethive network and the collaboration of separate Markethive groups all working in union with each other.
Unprecedented New Age
The opportunities and extraordinary value we have here at Markethive are unprecedented and as we move into an age where more people are looking to work from home. In many areas, the internet has become too complicated, too expensive, and too competitive. Not to mention the personal data breaches and lack of privacy that has become big news and a real controversy.
Blockchain technology has made it possible for Markethive to advance and offer far more for far less than any other platform or program out there today. Markethive’s vision is to give privacy, autonomy with every opportunity for true wealth via universal income while simplifying the process for anyone to successfully create and operate any business from the Markethive all-in-one platform.
This puts Markethive in the category of the next generation Market Network and the first to be built on the blockchain. Collaboration and the social media aspect is an integral component and the community spirit has brought Markethive’s vision into reality. Apart from all the features that can be accessed by free members, There is the opportunity to upgrade to The Entrepreneur One Loyalty Program. This is the premium highest level you will ever have the opportunity to acquire. It contains all the leveraged advantages you need to accelerate your success in Markethive. All the benefits are outlined here. This is a time-limited opportunity and there are only two more days to left to upgrade at the time of writing this article.
CEO and Founder of Markethive, Thomas Prendergast says,
“Markethive has already established itself in every country in the world. With the phenomena of the Covid 19 virus forcing the entire world to go home by force in many countries, the world is discovering entrepreneurialism and it is in the not too distant future, Markethive will explode across the planet.
If you had the clear focus of projective reasoning and purchased an Entrepreneur One before this wave explodes, you will be one of the very few with a system that will produce many millionaires and the generational wealth that will materialize, and that is why we built the Entrepreneur One platform. We built it for the Markethive visionaries and early adopters. Do not miss this once in a lifetime event. Do not just stand by as this massive event passes you by. Join Entrepreneur One now before the others sweep it up.”
What has transpired and will be with us in the wake of this global pandemic is the perfect storm for the next generation social and marketing platform, blockchain-driven, utilizing cryptocurrency to rise up from the devastation caused on all fronts. Called a Market Network noted by experts in the field, this is part of the new way of doing things. This is where complete sovereignty and financial freedom is not only possible, it’s probable.
If you like the idea and freedom of working from home or in a position where this crisis has affected you and are looking to adapt to a new career path then this may be the perfect time to shine. Markethive is truly dedicated to your education, success, and sovereignty with the automated tutorials to learn all aspects of Markethive and improve your user experience, plus it also pays all members to learn the Markethive system.
Markethive is at present, in BETA and as this is a mammoth undertaking, some features still in the works. Our target of 500 Entrepreneur Ones is almost complete which means we can move forward with more integrations making Markethive the first and only next-generation Social Market Network on Blockchain. We have the platform, now it’s up to us to learn it and take back control of our own lives, of our lifestyles and our personal happiness.
Deb Williams
A Crypto/Blockchain enthusiast and a strong advocate for technology, progress, and freedom of speech. I embrace "change" with a passion and my purpose in life is to help people understand, accept, and move forward with enthusiasm to achieve their goals.
