In November and December, my busiest months, I got involved with a local group of men who promote good mental health amongst men.  To raise some money and awareness we clubbed together and did a virtual e-cycle from Lands End to John O'Groats (this is called LEJOG and it is the two furthest points apart in the UK).  It was a tough cycle as we are all working men with families but we got there and raised over £2000 as well as making the local news.

Just after we finished the cycle, I found out that one of my friends had jumped/fallen to their death. He had suffered from poor mental health for a long time.  We met at university on our first day and became good friends.  Even though our careers took us to differing parts of the UK, we kept in touch.  He was only 40 years old.

Men can cry, we can ask for help. We should not "man up" and pretend all is ok when it is not.  

January is a bad time for a man to be down, what with the cold darkness and there are too many men at risk.  If you know someone, check up on them, see if you can include them in something.

I wish you all, good mental health for 2020 and that you and your men friends support one another.

FYI

Cybersecurity Trends 2020: Technology is getting smarter – are we?

https://www.welivesecurity.com/wp-conten...s_2020.pdf

14 Banks, 5 Tokens: Inside Fnality’s Expansive Vision for Interbank Blockchains
https://www.coindesk.com/fnality-utility...blockchain

I talked about CBDC earlier. An ancient invention by powerful people and organizations. Google it and you will see big names like C. Lagarde and others....

This is also interesting an hopefully something that can break the monopoly of Google and Facebook ads.

"Evan Schwartz, senior software developer at major crypto firm Ripple announced that he is leaving the cryptocurrency company after six and a half years.
On Jan 2, the software engineer took to Twitter to announce that after working 2,328 days at the blockchain giant, today will be his last. Schwartz tweeted:

Quote:

“After 2328 days, or just under 6.5 years, today is my last day at @Ripple. Thank you to everyone who helped make it such an exciting ride; I'll be cheering the team on from the outside. Keep on building the #InternetOfValue!”

Does any of you get the picture here.
It looks great but I am not sure I understand the system.
It seems to be based on Monero. Monero is king in privacy.

https://havenprotocol.org/

This morning I heard about some German economist predicting hyperinflation and collapse of the system in 2023. It should be quite huge in German. I can see there is a book from 2019 sadly in German and then an older one (2016) with something that looks like the same topic. Has anyone read the books or know more?

English book "The Crash is the Solution":
https://www.amazon.com/Crash-Solution-Ul...+Friedrich

German book (new) "Der größte Crash aller Zeiten" (meaning the biggest crash ever)
https://www.amazon.com/gr%C3%B6%C3%9Fte-...+Friedrich

I would like the read the German book but even I understand German okay fine I'm not able to read a "complicated" book in German so I wonder if there is an English version?

Hi! I've been trying to post this for some time... The forum is a mess here (in China right now). I am using a VPN to access it... so that maybe the problem. Anyway, I wanted to send you all a message for the new year. I hope everything is fine with you and your family. I wish you good health... and may 2020 be the year where we all become crazy rich with crypto!

All the news about Ripple seem only to be good news. Will 2020 be the year xrp will rise in value?

Ripple has agreed to enter into a strategic partnership with MoneyGram (NASDAQ: MGI), one of the world’s largest money transfer companies. Through this partnership, which will have an initial term of two years, Ripple would become MoneyGram’s key partner for cross-border payment and foreign exchange settlement using digital assets. In conjunction with the partnership, Ripple has agreed to provide a capital commitment to MoneyGram, which enables the company to draw up to $50 million in exchange for equity over a two-year period.


The partnership with Ripple will focus on the xRapid product, a solution for on-demand liquidity, which reduces reliance on pre-funding by enabling money to be sent from one currency and instantly settled in the destination currency. It leverages XRP, the native digital asset of the XRP Ledger, as a real-time bridge between the sending and receiving currencies. XRP remains the most efficient digital asset for settlement with transaction fees at just fractions of a penny, compared to other digital asset fees of about $30 per transaction. Similarly, the average transaction time for XRP is two to three seconds with other top digital assets ranging from 15 minutes to an hour.
“As the payments industry evolves and matures, it’s imperative that we continue to improve our platform and provide the most effective solution to get funds from point A to point B,” said Alex Holmes, MoneyGram Chairman and CEO. “Through Ripple’s xRapid product, we will have the ability to instantly settle funds from US dollars to destination currencies on a 24/7 basis, which has the potential to revolutionize our operations and dramatically streamline our global liquidity management.”

MoneyGram operates globally in the $600 billion global remittance market, serving millions of customers in more than 200 countries and territories, supporting multiple currencies. Today, MoneyGram relies on traditional foreign exchange markets to meet its settlement obligations, which require advance purchases of most currencies. Through this strategic partnership, MoneyGram will be able to settle key currencies and match the timing of funding with its settlement requirements reducing costs, improving its balance sheet efficiency and reducing risk.
“This strategic partnership will enable MoneyGram to greatly improve its operations and enable millions of people around the world to benefit from its improved efficiency. This is a huge milestone in helping to transform cross-border payments and I look forward to a long-term, very strategic partnership between our companies,” said Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple.

https://ripple.com/insights/ripple-annou...-moneygram

Happy new year to all even not many are still left.

Let's hope for a better 2020 and better world for all.

Carsten

The censorship by Facebook and YouTube (Google) is bad for all.

"YouTube, one of the most popular social media platforms for video sharing, has aggressively started deleting cryptocurrency-related content from some of the biggest influencers in the industry.
Based on Twitter and Reddit threads, YouTube suddenly began deleting a number of cryptocurrency videos on Dec. 23.
YouTuber Chris Dunn, whose channel has over 210,000 subscribers, noticed on Monday that the platform had removed all of his videos that mentioned cryptocurrencies.
Following this, Dunn tweeted, "@YouTube just removed most of my crypto videos citing 'harmful or dangerous content' and 'sale of regulated goods'... it's been 10 years of making videos, 200k+ subs, and 7M+ views. WTF are you guys doing @TeamYouTube?!""



https://cointelegraph.com/news/cryptocur...ed-content