Feathercoin Official Weekly Update #23

Tuesday 11^th March 2014

Listen. Time Passes

Feathercoin Key Stats
329 days since genesis block creation
Approx. 36,000,000 of Feathercoins created
Approx. 15.47 days behind target generation rate

How long are you planning on putting it off?

That idea you had, the one you have been meaning to get round to all this time, itâ€™s not as hard as you keep telling yourself it is.

The hardest part is starting. It starts with a decision to commit to a future identity. Identity is not just made up of the way we believe we are from the inside out but also about the way those around us see us from the outside in.

So choose to surround yourself with the right people, people you can have fun with, people who can get the best from one another. Discover your tribe and then itâ€™s just a case of managing the agreements you make.

Running a business is a lot like the running of the clock. The less you need to check on one anotherâ€™s progress the more efficiently the business is running. How much you care about the outcome is entirely up-to you.

What are you here to learn?

A business thrives when the rate of change inside outpaces the rate of change outside. The seconds chase you as you run after the day, caught up in the flow of it all.

Bitgild

by @Bushstar

When we were over in Amsterdam for the Bitcoin conference we bumped into keen crypto enthusiast Wouter Von. This chap runs several e-commerce sites including Bitspenders that at the time also accepted Bitcoin as an alternative or sometimes sole source of payment. I like to think that spending time with some of the altcoin crowd made him appreciate the need for diversity that altcoins bring to Bitcoin as Wouter has added altcoins to his merchant site Bitgild.

Small sample of Bitgild's items

What this means for us is that we can now go buy gold and silver bars and coins for Feathercoins. They have a good reputation so you can do this in confidence. My favorite on the site is a 12.5Kg gram gold bar which cost â‚¬390,184, it is a bit out of my price range but I still like to look at the pretty picture of it on the Bitgild site and dream on. Not everything is so expensive and I'm tempted to make a present out of their Heraeus 1g bar which cost â‚¬47.95.

Charity Lottery

by @Uncle Muddy

So far we have raised 4,215 FTC for Prostate Cancer, it's time to get on the case to push forwards towards the 6,000 FTC goal!

Prostate_Cancer_Donation_Target_4215FTC.

Prostate_Cancer_Donation_Target_4215FTC.

So who's in for a 1FTC stake?

The Rules

All stakes need to be received by 17:00 UK time on a Saturday Night, the reported confirmed transaction time on the wallet will be used to monitor this
Max 1 entry per person
http://www.random.org/ will be used to select the winning number
10% of all stakes will got to the charity fund, the rest to the winner (that could be you)

How to Join In
If you have an address from the raffle you can use that to send in your 1FTC stake, if you don't or you need it again drop me a PM and I'll send you one over. I will post up a list of names for the lottery draw by 18:30 on the Saturday night in the post just below this one. I will video the draw taking place around 19:00 and the winner will be paid out shortly afterwards.

Other ways to donate to the cause
You could always just donate by sending coins to the charity pot using the address 6eshhwBr7W8ynbFobDyoMD5zPK9F5E5ghP (coins sent here will not be included in the lottery) or you could donate some hashing power to the community payback P2Pool node

Keep your eyes peeled on the forum, for the next big event due to be announced soon, once we have finalized the details. Thanks for your support once again

Visual Studio 2013

by @Bushstar

Good news for all those Visual Studio users out there, one of our newest forum members Claire has taken the time to port Feathercoin to Visual Studio. For those who like an IDE (Integrate Development Environment) and want to step out of the dark ages of hacking in notepad then you can check out Visual Studio 2013 which has a free edition.

Once you are setup with your new IDE you can go to the Feathercoin branch below to get the new VS version of Feathercoin. Remember that you still need to compile the dependencies for it to work but Claire has kindly included a script to take care of this for you.

Feathercoin GitHub VS2013 Branch

Hull City

by ChrisJ

We had the great pleasure to be invited up to Hull by Lisa and David at Hull City Council. For those of you who donâ€™t know Hull is a town on the upper right hand side of the English landscape, it has a beautiful bridge and wonderful people who are hungry for change.

Lisa and David were our hosts for the day

If you live in the UK and are not fortunate to reside in its capital city London then youâ€™re right out of luck. The entire UK economy is centralized around its capital. Sure there are political campaigns to get local investment in to some factory in the old industrial northern towns but by and large we have a service driven economy here. Half our day we spend serving others, the other half we get served. Unless you were lucky enough to get on the housing market train early and in which case our Help to Buy Scheme will give you lots of exit opportunities so you can get on with the more important task of making money; the hell with all this shelter from nature nonsense.

So early on in the presentation I made it clear that it was as much about what Bitcoin and Crypto could learn from the people as what the people could learn from Crypto. When I give these talks my goal is to help people feel inspired and for them to leave the discussion with ideas of their own.

The amazing David Gilson shows Anne-Marie & Katred how to setup a Feathercoin Wallet

And indeed that is what happened. Initially I experienced some push back; it felt very technical and complicated. But Lisa stepped up and reminded everyone that it wasnâ€™t very long ago before people started texting and sharing their lives on the internet. That things change very quickly and local governments must keep up with that change.

In some ways the problem with representative democracy is that it hasn't kept up with the speed at which information travels over space. This means that global events displace our local sequence of events. Itâ€™s not an interruption itâ€™s an inclusion and those closest to the real world situations can draw upon the wealth of resources that the global network of open source developers has to offer.

One gentleman at the back was curious to know why Hull needed to a crypto currency and why we couldn't just code our own similar to the Brixton pound. This was a legitimate question and of course the answer is â€œwhy would you when all the software for crypto is already available and being serviced for free?â€. Why canâ€™t local towns and villages like Hull get the benefits from the global open source community.

So finally I would like to pay tribute to Lisa and David for having the courage and initiative to be the first government organisation in the world to actually take the first step of trying out crypto. They are already mining Feathercoin with the view to handing them out to the local people in Hull under the Hull People's Premium. I am looking forward to see the video from the day.

Opportunities

by Ruthie

If youâ€™re looking for an opportunity to be part of the team here at Feathercoin then I would like to draw your attention to this thread.

Opportunities still vacant:

Marketing
Press
Community
Promotions
Merchant Outreach
Charity Outreach
News Letter Contributors

You will work closely with other team members on the forum and be part of the growing community. Please contact Ruthie on the Feathercoin forum if would like to find out more.

TL;DR

by Chris

The most talented people out there donâ€™t allow themselves to be the effects of others, they are the causes. They donâ€™t spend time they make time for whatâ€™s important.

Donâ€™t let the dry business literature fool you. Itâ€™s just fancy jargon about ideal cash-flow analysis and pallid looking men in suits shuffling emails and knocking up Powerpoint slides for their boss. Itâ€™s designed to make you feel like you donâ€™t belong here.

A business is just a sequence of events agreed upon by a group of people who believe in a common goal.

You could be doing anything right now, you are defined by what you make time for. Donâ€™t stop asking yourself who you were before society decided it for you and slowly day by day focus on becoming the person you want to be remembered as being.

You can find the last official newsletter here: One Equal Temper of Heroic Hearts. Today special thanks go to motherlode1, Ruthie, Bushstar, Uncle_Muddy and Chrisj for their contributions to this newsletter.

You can follow us on Twitter, Facebook or come on to the forum to stay up to date.

Thank-you for your time.