Bitcoin in turmoil?

Anyone watching the crypto market this morning will know bitcoin and ethereum have tanked against fiat currencies. This is likely caused by the issues of a delayed hard fork and rumours that the Chinese market is moving to litecoin. This makes now a great time to diverge your investments and buy up the altcoins. We're seeing less damage happening to the little guys. So who are the players?

Litecoin (LTC)
The Chinese coin has made since great advances in the last couple of days. Looking at the market history though its done this before and really shit itself afterwards. This is essentially a bitcoin clone but with more grey areas. Personally I won't trust a coin I can't find a white paper for. Not the best bet to go with.

Bytecoin (BCN)
The little coin that can. Bytecoin has weathered today's storm really well, loosing about 5% and getting back to yesterdays 80 satoshi, but over time its not made great gains compared to others and this is down to the lack of a road map for any usable tech. It's all been currency focused and no one will use it until it gets a higher value. In saying that it's been known to get to 100 satoshi which is a healthy 20% to make.

Digitalnote (XDN)
Saving the best for last. Another low value coin but with excellent potential. Whilst its taken a hit today its increases over the last few months show it has potential, making it a great medium to long term investment. The developers have been active this year with wallet updates and an anonymous messenger scheduled for Q4 of this year, once that's in use the coin and miners will be in high demand. They've also broken the mold with an Initial Crowd funding Coin Offering, the first of its kind attempt to gather coin from miners and traders to offer to larger investors at prices that won't cause a market explosion.

Methods of Control: Cults in Business

I write these to help people identify when they're being manipulated. Once you are aware of them you can protect yourself and make your own decisions rather be manipulated into making the decisions others want you to make.

The cult method:

1. Aim for people who feel marginalised, this is easier than it seems, practically everyone feels unique, that there's no one like them and no one really understand them.
2. Use language that makes them feel special.
3. Use words only the cult knows to get them curious.
4. Once they're in, be over stimulating, loud noises, chanting in groups, lots of cheering whooping and applause for the new initiates.
5. Next start degrading the target, make them crave the above praise.
6. Convince them the only support they get will be from the cult.
7. Convince them no one else understands them, this is reinforced by the language used by the cult.
8. Offer levels to go through to improve themselves as a reward system, give them the praise they crave.

Now to go through where these are used, now Scientology would be the obvious one to go for but I think it'll be more interesting to use business to demonstrate this. Six sigma will be the main one I use but not limited just to it.

• Marginalised people: aiming for people under pressure to make improvements. Management are a minority often disliked by those under them and pressured by those over them. The junior employee underpaid and desperate to get ahead. These are prime targets for indoctrination.
• Getting people into these methods appeal to peoples egos, telling them they're intelligent and their position makes them special.
• Six sigma and many other business methodologies are rife with there own words, SIPOC, Kaizen, MoSCoW and RACI. While others like Agile have scrums and waterfalls, which make sense outside the business world so have the hook to get people in.
• Once you join things turn in to a Tony Robbins seminar with cheering and applause for the new people. Reassurance that you can do it if you dedicate your time to it thus distracting you from alternatives.
• Then comes the degradation, convince people that what they've done so far is useless and that using their method is the only path to success.
• Dependency on the method, using the buzzwords show how things can only be achieved using their methods, use case examples from big name brands and companies to convince people their method is the only path to success.
• Support, convince the initiate that they can only use approved websites and reading materials, most of which require membership.
• Support of other members, once the initiate is indoctrinated enough they'll be using the methods language, the only people who can understand them are other initiates, this also convinces others they need to be indoctrinated.
• Levels, most notably with six sigma there's 2 grades. The tests for which need to be paid for, again using language people know but don't fit in the business world, green belt and black belt. The lower level green belt is a continuous certification, the exam isn't standard entrants must study together and develop together, this strengthens the cult situation, the exam then isn't about right answers but about prime having similar answers, showing a group mind not individual thought. The more illustrious black belt is tested the same but on a much harsher scale followed up with regular retesting based on project work from your given business.

Don't be mistaken six sigma isn't all bad and does have some useful elements but so do others like agile but they use cult methods to keep themselves relevant and in businesses, you shouldn't keep yourself limited to just one. I use business methodology to demonstrate the innocuous places methods of control happen. Thinking for yourself will always be more successful, common sense and thinking things through will always be a stronger than someone else's ideals. Be adaptable, be creative and be yourself.

Rant on analysis 1 of many

There's nothing I enjoyed more in my old job than a fresh streaming pile of raw data, give me a months data and a quarter to compare it to, I'm like a pig in shit. Nothing teaches you more about statistics than wading into it up to the knees. From fucking around with SQL to force a database into giving you what you need, to performing black magic with vlookups holding a concatenate referencing a pivot table makes my dick tingle. It's not just the joy of a good script coming together but the overview showing you in clear numbers or charts for the discalcic.

Then you must do the hard work RCA (Root Cause Analysis), comparing the results to the reality, then the horror kicks in. When looking into the causes of contact, often by listening in to calls you slowly realise that data gets skewed by laziness, things like 'billing' isn't the top call driver it's the top of the list. Then you need to start a new table, list the user, the reason given and the actual cause. From that you get what I call "frequent fuckers",
essentially an exclude list of users that misuse logging and cause anomalous data. Go back to the original piece of data, create a new tab with a table of the "frequent fuckers" to to your raw data putting in a vlookup against the new tab, if they're on the table get it to give a mark, throw in a ifna to keep it clean, rebuild your pivot table but this time add a filter to exclude the "frequent fuckers" and then this look different.

The worst thing someone can do is over use averages, averages are often the bit in the middle that no one uses, providing solutions on averages gives these best solution for no one.

Try it yourself, http://www.pewresearch.org/data/ has lots of data sets, see can you get to the same results they do, more interesting is if you don't, then you get to figure out why not. Any questions leave a comment, who knows I might even get back to you.