Subscribe to my DTube channel and earn cryptocurrency rewards for your best comments at: https://d.tube/#!/c/marketingmonk and https://steemit.com/@marketingmonk Click on a video and then click 'subscribe'. ----- In the last video I spoke to you from The Linq Hotel in Las Vegas, today I come to you from Heathrow airport having just got off my 10 hour flight. Story - Crypto Prices Fall On Google Ban News https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2018-03-14/google-to-ban-cryptocurrency-initial-coin-offering-ads-in-june As of June 2018, Google will ban online advertising promoting cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings. Is a certain world leading tech company getting a little concerned about a potentially invincible competitor? Looks that way to me. As ever, market participants respond to their perception, not reality. Most market participants don’t possess enough of an understanding of what the implications of any piece of news might be, they just make snap judgements based very limited understanding. We can wish it to be another way, we can wish that market participants were more rational but that’s never going to happen. The reality is that this move by Google may well slow down the rate at which crypto grows but it won’t stop it. I think they may just want to buy themselves some time. Google has now followed facebook in banning promotions for crypto projects. Their stated intention is to protect users from malicious and deceptive ads, however to my mind they are very unlikely to share their true intentions, because that often doesn’t serve their interests. So let me tell you what I think is going to happen now. Crypto projects are just going to focus on niche media outlets that Facebook and Google do not control. These are the likes of Cointelegraph, CoinDesk, ICO Alert and of course channels and podcasts like mine. The major difference between crypto ads that go through Google’s system and projects that come to me to be featured is that Google’s system is large automated, mine is not. By the time you see a sponsored video on my channel, I have made that project jump through so many hoops you wouldn’t believe it. Many of the steps in my filtering process are designed to see if a project will give up. Scammers tend not to prefer looking for the quick wins. So when they see everything they have to do to even be considered for a sponsored video, 95% of them I never hear from again. Now granted, a lot of my content is on YouTube which is supported by Google, so yes no more YouTube ads for crypto projects, but they can still do sponsored videos. And ultimately, word of mouth cannot be stopped either. And speaking of perception vs reality… The reality of the crypto fundamentals continues to march forward. ----- Story - Lightning lnd 0.4 Beta Mainnet Released https://blog.lightning.engineering/announcement/2018/03/15/lnd-beta.html Lightning Labs, one of at least 3 software teams that are developing the software for the Lightning network published this blog post about a new major release. Lightning network is a 2nd layer that is designed to sit on top of the Bitcoin network and, kind of like the London underground or the New York subway system, allow transactions to zip from person to person in such a way that it’s instant and almost free. Lightning network technology is already deployed on the Bitcoin network but many other cryptocurrencies are integrating the technology as well which will allow these different blockchains to communicate with each other and transact across chains. So think LiteCoin to Bitcoin, or Decred to Litecoin and so on. Now this release is lnd 0.4 beta and is designed to be run on the main Bitcoin network rather than the Bitcoin test network. This release has a whole bunch of new features and its primary intention is to allow developers to use it as a basis for building Lightning based apps or Lapps for short. To put that into perspective, an example app might be something like a Spotify type music app where you play or each play, or even perhaps pay for each second you listen to. That’s a micropayment example which is enabled by the instant and very cheap transactions but there’s nothing stopping you sending large amounts. It’s just a case of the software still being in beta, so the article advises you, if you are a developer wanting to test this out, do so with only small amounts of Bitcoin. That’s just in case there is a bug and you lose your money, you only want to lose a small amount.