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John Goff bets on Blockchain

Christopher Helman Forbes Staff

Forbes Digital Covers Contributor Group

John Goff, one of America’s savviest commercial real estate investors, has a vision of using blockchain tech to store real estate titles.

John Goff, one of America’s savviest commercial real estate investors, says he “wasn’t smart enough” to have seen the Great Recession coming in 2007. But the billionaire had an inkling. At the time he was chairman of the board of Fort Worth-based Crescent Real Estate, one of the nation’s biggest REITs, with a portfolio of 54 office buildings. “Every asset we had was getting an offer,” Goff recalls. But when he surveyed the landscape, “I didn’t understand the pricing, found nothing to buy,” he says. So in August 2007 he did the only thing that made sense: He sold.

Morgan Stanley paid $6.5 billion for Crescent at the peak of the real estate market. For Goff, who made about $220 million on his shares, the timing couldn’t have been better. He stood unscathed, watching agape as the portfolio his team had built crumbled in value. By the end of 2009 Morgan Stanley had written off its equity in the investment and handed Crescent over to Barclays, which had loaned $3.5 billion on the deal. Figuring no one knew the properties better than Goff, Barclays teamed with him to manage the portfolio and try to get its money back. Which over the next few years he did, and then some, by gradually liquidating more than $2 billion of office towers into a strengthening market. Favorite assets, like the high-end Canyon Ranch health resort, Goff bought himself. Last year, when they officially ended their joint venture, Barclays even handed the Crescent name back to Goff.

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Billionaire John Goff at his McKinney and Olive tower in Dallas.TIM PANNELL

So now, a decade after he dodged a bullet by selling his company, Goff is back in control of it again, with a concentrated portfolio of premium properties that he says he likes well enough to hold onto through any economic downturn. Not that he thinks that’s coming—at least not yet. “I’m bullish on the economy,” he says. “The tax cuts are big, and we’re so behind on GDP growth coming out of the Obama years.” Rising interest rates are largely baked in to real estate prices, he says. Low unemployment is great for occupancy rates. As is America’s predictable population growth of 2 million people per year. An even more important trend: wealth creation. According to Paris-based consultancy Capgemini, the number of high-net-worth Americans ($1 million of investable assets) has been growing at a 7.8% clip since 2010. With the rich getting richer, Goff is sure of growing demand for top-drawer properties.

Take Goff’s new office building McKinney & Olive, a 530,000-square-foot, 20-story glass trapezoid designed by starchitect Cesar Pelli in the Uptown neighborhood of Dallas. “I think it’s a sexy building,” Goff says. He’s particularly fond of how the top of it juts out over its namesake intersection, meaning the top floors have more premium square footage than those below. Great for the building’s economics, says a grinning Goff, who remains boyish at 63. Commercial tenants willing to pay the highest rents anywhere in the city (about $60 per square foot) can rub shoulders in the onsite yoga studio with hotshots from McKinsey & Co. and ad giant Saatchi & Saatchi. There’s also a chic Starbucks Reserve Bar and an acre of public green space. To pick out the marble for the soaring lobby, Goff took his wife, Cami, to the best quarries in Carrera, Italy. Building McKinney & Olive cost about $225 million, most of it from J.P. Morgan Asset Management.

Goff started out in the industry on the ground floor. As a kid in Lake Jackson, Texas, “I was a regular down at the dump,” he says. “I loved taking stuff apart, breaking it into components,” which ended up strewn around the house. He built a submarine out of a hot water heater. “It drove my mother crazy.” By age 13 John started working as a handyman at a family friend’s apartment complex. It wasn’t long before he was managing the place, down to collecting rent. That was enough for him to catch the real estate bug. After studying accounting at the University of Texas, Goff became a CPA, working at KPMG for real estate clients, first in Houston, then in Fort Worth.

In 1987 Goff got his big break when billionaire investor Richard Rainwater hired him to bring some order to his disparate holdings. In the 1970s Rainwater had made a name— and a lot of money—for himself helping Fort Worth’s Sid Bass and his three brothers turn a small fortune left by their oil tycoon uncle Sid Richardson into a big one, primarily by building up controlling stakes in undervalued oddballs like National Alfalfa. At one point they owned 10% of Texaco, 5% of Marathon Oil and a $3 billion controlling stake in Walt Disney.

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By the late 1980s Rainwater had gone out on his own, with an office in Fort Worth that became known as a deal shop, where the phones were always ringing. Rainwater’s operation was staffed by a cadre of young go-getters who later developed into tycoons in their own right, including Sears boss Eddie Lampert, TPG private equity honcho David Bonderman and energy infrastructure guru Ken Hersh. George W. Bush was Rainwater’s partner in the Texas Rangers baseball team. “Dad didn’t invest with anyone he didn’t think was the Michael Jordan of their arena,” says his son Todd Rainwater (Richard died in 2015).

Rainwater, Inc., was a ticket to nirvana. Goff emptied out his 401(k) of $14,100 after penalties in order to put his money to work with Rainwater. (“Scared the heck out of me,” he says.) In an early deal Goff brought Dallas Cowboys Hall of Fame quarterback Roger Staubach over to see Rainwater. Staubach had started a commercial real estate brokerage and needed some liquidity. They gave him $1 million cash for 20% of the equity. (Which turned into more than $70 million when Staubach sold to Jones Lang Lasalle for $650 million in 2008.)

In 1994 Rainwater and Goff made their first big real estate deal, for the Crescent, a 1.3 million-square-foot neoclassical complex by architect Philip Johnson that oil heiress Caroline Rose Hunt had spent $500 million building in an unloved corner of Dallas. Finished in 1986, the Crescent was in danger of defaulting on $250 million in debt. Backed with a $100 million letter of credit from Rainwater, Goff crisscrossed the country and negotiated with banks to buy up all the building’s distressed paper for just $172 million.

A decade after he dodged a bullet by selling his company, Goff is back in control of it again, with a portfolio of properties he says he’ll hold onto through any economic downturn.

It was a sweet debut deal, and the duo ended up naming their real estate company after it, taking it public in a $650 million IPO in 1994. They raised even more in follow-on offerings and deployed the capital to ultimately acquire 40 million square feet of properties, including One Buckhead Plaza in Atlanta, the Alhambra in Coral Gables, Florida, and the Exchange Building in downtown Seattle. Resort investments included the Ventana Inn & Spa and the Sonoma Mission Inn. In Dallas, next to the Crescent, they built a Ritz-Carlton, designed by starchitect Robert A.M. Stern. And they paid out big dividends, including an estimated $100 million to Goff.

There were some missteps along the way like buying the real estate under a chain of old folks’ homes that 60 Minutes later exposed for patient neglect. But for the most part Goff has succeeded by hewing to a strategy that he first avowed to Forbes in 2002: “I want to be where capital isn’t flowing.” It was this eclectic portfolio that Morgan Stanley bought for $6.5 billion at the peak of the market. When Lehman Bros. collapsed a year later, Goff found himself on the sidelines with $200 million of Morgan Stanley’s money.

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Goff outside the McKinney and Olive tower in Dallas.TIM PANNELL

Grateful for dry powder, Goff again waded into the distressed debt markets and was buying when Morgan finally defaulted and handed Crescent over to Barclays. “I tried to buy 100%, but we couldn’t agree to terms,” he says. So instead he forged a joint venture with Barclays to manage the assets and get its $2.7 billion back. In 2011 they sold a collection of Texas office buildings (including the original Crescent complex in Dallas) to J.P. Morgan Asset Management for $1.9 billion and in 2013 sold another complex to Cousins Properties for $1.1 billion. Goff bought the Dallas Ritz-Carlton and Canyon Ranch for his own account. By last year Barclays had been returned its billions in loans, plus interest, plus dividends, plus some equity in a handful of buildings they now co-own with Goff.

The cherry on top: Goff got his company back and started the process of building all over again. He launched a new fund called the GP Invitation Fund to bring in money from friends to invest in new deals. It has so far acquired six hotels, including the Hotel Crescent Court and Spa in Dallas for $75 million, the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver for $125 million and a Westin in Atlanta for $85 million. They’re also building a 700-room hotel complex in Nashville. Crescent now has $2.8 billion under management. Roger Staubach says he’s an investor in the fund. So is Dary Stone, former CEO of Cousins Properties, who lauds Goff for his discipline in staying picky while being pitched on every real estate deal in America: “His biggest challenge is in saying no.”

Outside of the Crescent umbrella, Goff holds what he considers to be his single most important investment. Canyon Ranch, which bills itself as a wellness resort, has two locations, one in Lenox, Massachusetts, a touristy bit of New England, and the original in quintessential dude ranch country outside Tuscon, Arizona. The place dates to 1979, founded by Mel Zuckerman, an asthmatic, overweight CPA from New Jersey who visited an Arizona “fat farm” with his wife, Enid. In a spiritual awakening the couple became health nuts, and they decided to stay in Arizona to build their own operation. Canyon Ranch was a progenitor among “wellness” resorts, offering programs for everything from aquatics, Pilates and horses to a $2,950 course of polysomnography—all night sleep monitoring.

For the most part Goff has succeeded by hewing to a strategy that he first avowed to Forbes in 2002: “I want to be where capital isn’t flowing.”

Richard Rainwater fell in love with the place on his first visit in the 1990s. He and Goff immediately befriended Zuckerman, and Crescent began financing Canyon Ranch’s improvement and expansion. By 2007, when they sold to Morgan Stanley, Crescent had 49% of the resort company. Goff bought that whole stake for his own account at the same time he and Barclays took the portfolio back from Morgan Stanley in 2009. In 2014 Goff acquired another 20% stake after buying up a convertible bond issue. Last year Goff completed a deal with Zuckerman to buy his remaining shares.

“John is the right person, because over the years he used Canyon Ranch not just to take a vacation but to help find change and meaning,” Zuckerman says. “He understands it for its purpose. He gets us.”

The new owner does have some changes in mind. Last year Goff moved Canyon Ranch headquarters to his own offices in Fort Worth. And he gave the nod for its spas to start offering botox treatments for the first time (Zuckerman wasn’t a fan). Goff plans to leverage the Canyon Ranch brand in a franchise-model expansion. Already there are Canyon Ranch-branded spas on board 22 cruise ships, including Cunard’s Queen Mary 2, and in Vegas a 160,000-square-foot mega-spa at Sheldon Adelson’s Venetian hotel. Goff envisions dozens more locations: “Someday Canyon Ranch will be bigger than Crescent ever was.”

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The trophy room at the Greystone Castle Sporting Club, a hunting lodge in Mingus, Texas, co-owned by John Goff.TIM PANNELL

Goff is also busy training the next generation. In a light-filled space looking out on Fort Worth’s carefully gentrified Sundance Square district, Goff’s office is right next to that of his 34-year-old son Travis. An avid video gamer, Travis forged a deal last year to join Cowboys owner Jerry Jones to acquire a controlling stake in esports team Complexity Gaming, which is now headquartered alongside the Cowboys. “Their autograph lines are longer than for pro athletes,” the elder Goff marvels.

He keeps up with the digital stuff. Down the hall two twentysomething traders mine the digital currency Ethereum from their workstations. Last fall they persuaded Goff to seed them $5 million to launch a crypto-blockchain investment fund. Even after recent months of white-knuckle volatility, Goff says he’s up on his bet, and he has a vision of using blockchain tech to store real estate titles. It’s a lark, he says with a grin. “I’m willing to lose it all tomorrow.”

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Blockchain Real Estate

xDALE is a Smart Contract Real Estate Marketing Organization. It can be seen as the “Un-Broker”.

The Real Estate Services industry is rife with red tape and other inefficiencies. It is an environment based on paranoia. The proprietors are paranoid about wire transfer fraud, excessive fees. The lawyers are resentful of the high compensation paid to brokers and the brokers resent the fastidious lawyers who kill more deals than bad credit. Furthermore, the listing agents resent having to co-broke a listing and often withhold access to potential customers. This does a disservice to the Landlord. There is a lot of leg work involved which requires pre-qualification of the customer. Finally, the customer often hides the truth of his personal background for fear of application denial. In many cases he must pay creative deposit fees, move-in fees, and application fees.

All these elements come after the rigorous search for available listing and many proprietors want to do it themselves and do not subscribe to a MLS. Therefore, a confusing multitude of alternative websites now pop-up to host listings. The solution to these inefficiencies are self-managing smart contracts. The following are some XDALE-Benefits to the players in a real estate transaction.

SALESPERSONS

  • A decentralized peer to peer network
  • Less paperwork
  • Faster closings
  • Conflicts are eliminated between staff and proprietors
  • Expanded territory beyond local market
  • No need to sell, simply supervise property tours
  • Option to be paid a flat salary a draw against future earnings
  • Listing exclusives are guaranteed via publicized NFT images
  • Agent has personal ecommerce web page
  • Compensation is transparently delivered via deFi wallet

BROKERS

  • Eliminated expense of Errors and Omissions Insurance
  • Low commission payout; higher profit margin per transaction
  • Lowered transaction expenses due to deFi
  • ERC20 token allows for rewards program to customers

LANDLORDS

  • Flat-fee option
  • Crowd-funding in some jurisdictions
  • Property tokenized to Title Search Database
  • International investment potential
  • Wire fraud vulnerability eliminated

CUSTOMERS

  • Smart contract arbitrator supervises your rights versus the Proprietor
  • Bureaucracy elimination lends speed and savings
  • Your sensitive data is kept offline in cold storage then erased as scheduled

If you wanted to rent your apartment to someone, you’d need to pay a middleman such as Craigslist or a newspaper to advertise, and then again you’d need to pay someone to confirm that the person paid rent and followed through.

A decentralized solution can help cut your costs. All you do is pay via cryptocurrency and encode your contract on a smart contract. Everyone sees, and you accomplish automatic fulfillment. Brokers, real estate agents, hard money lenders, and anyone associated with the property game can profit.

Smart contracts are revolutionary in terms of transforming the current real estate practices.

Smart contracts are replacing traditional contracts as the sole agreement between the seller and buyer. It automatically executes the requirements as soon as specific conditions of the contract are met.

Smart contracts guarantee trust through a single version of the truth by establishing trust. All the parties including the bank, the agent, and the mortgage lender can sign an agreement via smart contracts. Because transactions are kept on a blockchain, this shared ledger enables the parties involved to look over the process at any moment and from anywhere.

A smart contract is a self-executing digital agreement that enables two or more parties to exchange money, property, shares, or anything of value in a transparent, conflict-free way while avoiding the need for a third party.

Smart Contracts are Awesome! |

Autonomy |

Trust |

Backup |

Safety |

Speed |

Savings |

Accuracy |

But, Smart Contracts Are Not Perfect

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Real Estate on the Blockchain

Façinations Journal (http://www.façinations.com )

Façinations Journal (http://www.façinations.com )

Dec 1, 2021

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Tokenize Your Real Estate Project

Real-T is focused on the tokenization of real assets. We have many clients tokenizing real estate including some of the biggest projects globally. We are ready to help get your project off the ground!

The Global Tokenization Market

World Economic Forum: 10% of global GDP on blockchain by 2027
Finyear: tokenization market CAGR at 59% from 2019–2030
Frankfurt School BC: Europe tokenization market $1.5 trillion in 2024

JLL: 80% of all investments into real estate in just 60 cities around the globe, meaning that 1000s of areas are underserved.
MIT: 93% of real estate is beyond the reach of retail investors.
Better Homes and Gardens: 89% of US investors interested in real estate but only 3% has invested.

Go here to Read more

More from Façinations Journal (http://www.façinations.com )

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Dec 1, 2021

An Introduction to Solidity, the Language that Runs Ethereum

By Neetesh Mehrotra – August 20, 2019 Solidity is an object-oriented, statically typed, high-level scripting language for implementing smart contracts, which are programs that govern the behaviour of accounts within the Ethereum realm. Learn more about Solidity in this article. Solidity is a contract-based, advanced programming language. Its syntax is…

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An Introduction to Solidity, the Language that Runs Ethereum

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A Token to represent Digital Art

This is a re-post

Currency is boring. Let’s make GIFs!

On Friday May 2nd, around 7pm, Kevin McCoy completed transaction #1217706 on the Namecoin block chain. McCoy was taking part in Rhizome’s Seven on Seven, the fifth annual conference pairing up of artists and technologists at the New Museum. And that transaction through Namecoin, one of the countless spinoffs of Bitcoin, created an entry in a public ledger of exactly which bits are changing hands between two people.

But this transaction was different from the millions of other ledger entries tracked by Bitcoin and its variants.

Excerpt of cars.gif by Jennifer & Kevin McCoy
(not monegraph signed)

This time, the bits being traded weren’t just tracking a virtual currency. Instead, they were tied to an original digital artwork created by established artists, becoming the first to follow a new convention called “monegraph”.

Copy and Paste

There has been hand-wringing about the fate of digital artists for at least as long as there has been digital art. But as most everyone’s computers got connected over the last two decades, the most fundamental cause of concern has been the effortlessness with which any given work can be instantly, and perfectly, copied. In a realm where novelty, rarity and exclusivity underpin so much of the (real or perceived) value of a work, copy and paste goes from being an act of creation to an act of destruction.

Reblogging is essential to getting the word out for many digital artists, but potentially devastating to the value of the very work it is promoting. What’s been missing, then, are the instruments that physical artists have used to invent value around their work for centuries — provenance and verification.

Provenance for an artwork can be asserted in countless ways, from witnessing performance art firsthand to having a world-famous auction house bet its credibility on whether a work is an original or not. This function is critical not just in enabling an economic art market, but also in the study and understanding of individual artworks and their context within a movement or culture.

Verification, on the other hand, takes on a new urgency in the digital realm. In this context, verification means the validation that a work is unchanged from its original form, and that the work in question is the actual work being discussed as a creation. It has, of course, always been possible to forge a work (and this is one of the issues meant to be solved in physical art by checking provenance), but there’s a more philosophical debate about verification in the digital realm, where simply viewing an image in a web browser results in a copy being made on the viewer’s computer or phone.

Various efforts have been made to assert forms of provenance and verification for digital art over the past few decades, but most relied on the artworks to remain within closed, proprietary technological silos; few were designed to verify a work while also allowing it to be widely displayed across the Internet. As a result, the only way for artists to really build a market around their digital works has been to convert them into physical forms.

Lemons

At the opposite end of the technological spectrum from experimental artists, we find the Bitcoin community. For the past few years, its members have been boundlessly enthusiastic about a technology that, for most Internet users, is hard to understand and even harder to put to use. We are so used to hyperbole that it may not be clear, but Bitcoin really is a new technology. And the block chain technology that enables it absolutely is groundbreaking.

What the technology behind Bitcoin enables, in short, is the ability to track online trading of a digital object, without relying on any one central authority, by using the block chain as the ledger of transactions. The problem is that the conversation about these inventions is insular even by the standards of the tech industry, populated with fake Satoshis and genuine Winklevii.

Perhaps the most damning critique of the Bitcoin community is to point to what passes for innovation. Bitcoinists tend to focus on a series of nearly-identical clones of the original currency, distinguished only by increasingly esoteric names. There’s Dogecoin, after the ubiquitous shiba pidgin meme. Litecoin, “lite” because it can run on cheaper computers. Coinye came closest to connecting with a working artist, by dint of having been an unauthorized appropriation of Kanye West’s name. What Bitcoin projects mostly haven’t tackled are big challenges in civics or activism or art, aside from is-this-a-joke projects like the Bitcoin Art Gallery. There is no gastrocurrency or cartocurrency. There is only cryptocurrency, an egregious coinage coinage.

It’s increasingly clear that a virtual currency is perhaps the most boring thing one could create with Bitcoin technology.

This disconnect from the real world is pervasive even though some of the biggest names in the venture capital industry have poured tens of millions of dollars into Bitcoin and related technologies. Though it’s still early, the primary focus of this enormous infusion of normocurrency thus far has been a series of “digital wallets”. You know digital wallets — every other year Google, or Microsoft, or Square, or other tech titans try to get you to pay for things by storing your credit card number in their online services. The new products seem to promise to combine the unpopularity of digital wallets with the inscrutability of using Bitcoin in lieu of your credit card.

Today’s Bitcoin converts too often sound like someone waxing enthusiastic about the Lemonade Stand game on their old Commodore 64. It’s clear that geeks are having fun creating a virtual market, but it’s hard to understand how almost anyone else would benefit from it.

When life gives you a market for digital lemons.

Chain

Rhizome’s Seven on Seven conference has an august history, bringing together formidable artists with truly credible technologists, at least until I got picked as one of those technologists. Held at the New Museum, this year’s event set the bar high from the start, opening on Saturday morning with a corker of a keynote from Kate Crawford followed by an excerpt from a video of the late Aaron Swartz discussing his 2012 collaboration with Taryn Simon, Image Atlas.

Kate’s characteristically brilliant presentation contextualized normcore and the NSA and drones and Occupy, in case anyone worried that every Big Important Idea couldn’t fit into a single talk. Following that with an evocation of tech’s most besainted young activist was enough to move anyone in the audience, not just those of us who were his friends. And then six pairs of extraordinarily talented artists and technologists followed. We still had a full seven hours to go until we were scheduled to present.

Kevin McCoy and I were batting cleanup together. Kevin and I had met just 48 hours earlier, with no introduction and little instruction except that we would have one day to create something we wanted to share with this audience. Within five minutes of our initial introduction, we knew exactly what we wanted to build. Each of us had been ruminating about the potential applications of Bitcoin’s block chain technology to the realm of digital art for months. Given the pedigree of the event, we knew we would have to at least present an idea worthy of Seven on Seven, even if its execution were necessarily compromised by the 24-hour deadline on which it was created.

I’ll skip past the typical hagiographic creation myth here to instead emphasize the fact that much of this idea was not novel. Indeed, many people have been pondering this exact combination of art and technology — enough that Kevin and I asked each other several times, “Why the hell hasn’t anyone done this before?” Just some of the influences on our thinking:

  • In February, Paul Ford outlined non-currency uses of the block chain in MIT Technology Review: “[T]ake digital art. Larry Smith, … an analyst with long experience in digital advertising and digital finance, asks us to ‘imagine digital items that can’t be reproduced.’”
  • Rafaël Rozendaal’s sale of If No Yes late last year, relied on the Internet’s conventional Domain Name System (DNS) as the proof of digital uniqueness but galvanized a conversation about digital art sales.
  • Manuel Araoz focused on the verification potential of block chains with Proof of Existence, launched two years ago to provide exactly what it says, without trying to address transfer of title to any works it recorded.
  • Even otherwise-conventional technology startups have toyed with related ideas, including NeonMob (which uses a closed system to verify provenance) and the as-yet-unlaunched Electric Objects, which seems to focus on the display of digital artworks in the home.
  • And Paddy Johnson’s March review of Brad Troemel’s FREEDOM LIGHTS OUR WORLD (FLOW) spoke directly to the potential of block chains in an artistic context:

The kind of subcultural shadiness that’s associated with the crypto-currency seems to indirectly address the concerns of an unregulated art world, and the very structure of the currency provides a direct parallel to how value is constructed in the art world. Like Litecoin’s “block chain,” a built-in algorithm that creates a digital trail of every transaction ever executed, the art market uses provenance to construct value. The coins themselves may be just swag, but they’re now packaged as a known asset class, poised to take on a new value as art.

All of this to say: Ain’t nothin’ new under the sun. And yet, for all the conversation, and all the people who’ve been ruminating on provenance and verification in a digital world, we hadn’t seen the pieces come together until now. That little bit of hacking Kevin did last Friday night may mark the moment that everything went from theory to practice.

Monetized Graphics

Behold:
Monetized Graphics

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy have been digital art pioneers for two decades. Just a brief glimpse at their work zips through television and DVDs and the web and GIFs and sculpture and software. And the themes that emerge push deeply into how we share experiences, what our cultural memory is around media, what becomes of time and distance in a digital world. This is work with meaning, with presence. In more recent pieces, seeing some of these works captured in physical form seems to be constraining them as much as it is containing them. It’s clear the future of their work requires being freed to be even more a part of the Internet.

Exemplifying this evolution is cars.gif. Created by Kevin for the monegraph project from a video that Jennifer and Kevin had created years ago, cars.gif became the first block chain-verified digital original just a few hours after we started working on the project.

We picked the phrase “monetized graphics” on a lark.

Even days later, we never stopped laughing at how “monetized graphics” captured an absurdly crass version of how people would interpret a market for digital art. By the time we would begin to demonstrate the concept, we were sleep-deprived enough that it seemed likely nobody would get the joke. Maybe “monetized graphics” was the kind of thing that only seemed funny if approached with the mindset of an undergrad who’s been cramming for an exam all night.

Fortunately, when we showed the introductory video (above) at the New Museum, the crowd seemed to go along with us. They were in on the joke. We followed the ridiculous video with a quick explanation of the format that Kevin had come up with to ensure provenance and verification, which we had dubbed “monegraph” — a serendipitously pleasing concatenation of “monetized graphics”.

Putting the pieces together

What had become clear was that, for any given digital work, it only takes two steps to ensure its originality. First, a public claim to ownership or creation of that work has to be asserted. And second, that claim and a representation of the work itself has to be captured in the block chain, so there is a public record in the ledger and a way to record any transfers of that title in the future. Thus, there are just three key parts to verifying digital art with monegraph (here with examples of each):

  • A work: Your clever animated .gif
  • A claim: A public tweet saying that the work is yours
  • A record: An entry in the block chain, recording this information in a particular format

Despite being the “technologist” of our pair, I am also a worse programmer than Kevin, so I set about creating a simple website for monegraph that would accept your Twitter login and the web address for your work, and give you a tweet to make your claim, along with the information to put in the block chain record.

Meanwhile, Kevin set about creating the format for that record, ensuring that it would be a flexible and intelligent starting point for these kinds of technologies. While it’s easy to imagine an implementation that might have involved creating yet another new Bitcoin clone, Kevin decided in the interest of expediency to piggyback on Namecoin, which had been designed with a little bit of room for storing extra information like the records we were hoping to create. Namecoin had an existing block chain, and monegraph would make use of it to store its claims. That accommodation in Namecoin’s design was a result of brilliant thinking in the early days of Bitcoin, imagining what its most inventive purposes might be; the definitive articulation of that thinking was in a brief essay by Aaron Swartz.

The worthwhile questions

The end result of a day’s work on monegram is that almost anyone with a Twitter account could claim a digital image, get back a chunk of specially-encoded information representing their record, and then copy and paste that chunk into a Namecoin program and have a verifiable record of their claim. At current Namecoin exchange rates, it costs about four cents to make a record for a new artwork, or to transfer a title to an artwork.

Namecoin block chain entry for the initial registration of cars.gif

To be sure, this was a hacky way of doing things. The app you have to use to get a Namecoin address and enter in these records looks like some abandoned system utility from Windows 95. There’s presently no place for a normal Internet user to go and even download the Namecoin app because they’re redoing their website. If you have an iPhone, you’ll never have a Namecoin app because Apple doesn’t like Bitcoin and its variants. The state of the art is, well, impossible.

And yet. If you were willing to hunt down the nerdy bits needed, and to put up with the annoyances and inconveniences, something new was happening. In the room at the New Museum, the minute that Kevin transferred ownership of one of his animated GIFs to me (I paid him four bucks out of my wallet in exchange for the Namecoin transaction), it was clear that there’s something interesting here. Some really good questions are being raised:

  • Sure, it’s nice if an artist can sell the title to one of their digital works, but what else can we build around the ideas of provenance and verification?
  • Assuming that block chains are as secure as they appear to be, what can we do to enable art heists?
  • Now that the basic structure of monegraph is laid out, what would an artist-ready experience look like? (Today, the block chain looks like the raw output of a computer program; it’s easy to imagine a block chain of artworks that was displayed more like a Twitter or Tumblr stream.)
  • We’ve demonstrated a proof of concept using a GIF image, but what would change if we were trying to use an audio or video clip? What about an app or computer program? What about a whole website?
  • How does this intersect with copyright? What changes to intellectual property law might be required? What improvements to IP law might be made?
  • How will we get artists ready for the changes that might confront them with these new capabilities? Can we protect the art and its expression?
  • Given that monegraph makes no attempt to verify someone’s claims, how will we build trust systems to deal with the inevitable gold rush of people falsely claiming others’ works?

These are the questions that a work like monegraph is meant to enable. But as with any new idea, it can be difficult to reckon with the implications. Steven Melendez asserted that monegraph could “eradicate fake digital art”, when this is exactly backwards. In fact monegraph makes it possible to have “fake digital art”, because prior to this we had no consistent way of defining an “original”.

Fortunately, we’re also seeing people joining the conversation around these ideas. Whitney Mallett summarized some of the most tantalizing potential:

Blockchain-verified digital art could catch on, and if it did, it could create a more traditional model of authorship for net artists as they negotiate the murky world of authorship and ownership online.

What’s clear is that this conversation will be happening in studios and museums, amongst non-profits and artists’ workshops, between coders and curators. Where it doesn’t seem to have taken root is in the most conventional venues of the technology industry. When Kevin and I were asked to represent Seven on Seven by demoing monegraph to the crowd at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, we began with the title “monetized graphics”, just as we had at the New Museum.

The museum crowd had seen “monetized graphics”, understood the tone and intuitively understood why we’d chosen that ridiculous name. But in a room full of people who were otherwise enthralled by Bitcoin as a technology, the absurdity read instead as a straightforward goal, eliciting almost no reaction. We explained the details of Namecoin transaction #1217706, and why it was significant to artists and creators of all stripes.

There were no questions from the audience.

Thanks to Quinn Norton, Kevin McCoy, Rex Sorgatz, Kate Lee, Evan Hansen, Zeynep Tufekci, Clive Thompson, and Paul Ford

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The More That Things Change, The More That They Stay The Same

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If You Own Something

October 1, 2021

Hello You

There is no denying that the modern world has changed over the past 18 months. In subtle ways, disruptions in lifestyle have been met with new methods of doing business. 

The Bitbrowze platform upon which rests dApps such as Real-T and Xeries has been released. These smartcontracts usher in new possibilities to conduct business more privately and securely than ever. Blockchain technology has matured and is adopted globally for various endeavors from currency to the ballot box. 

We once asked with respect to Real Estate, “Who needs the middleman, such as a real estate broker? Now we ask further, who needs a  middleman, such as a retail banker? What do these people actually do for you? Retail bankers rely on a centralized computer system that adds your demographics and other data to a centralized database that belongs to the bank. The other data is a record of your assets. Those assets are called currency, which are pieces of i.o.u-paper that is owed to you by the Central Bank. All this digitized private information is at the mercy of those strangers. Not to mention that it is shared by the most intrusive big brother of all that can make hell for many people – The Credit Reporting Agency! For this privilege, you actually pay them more than the few percentages in “interest” that they pay you on a savings account. The net loss is yours. 

Decentralized banking is a term that has been construed in the wake of the cryptocurrency boom. … The people needed in a bank to approve loans and to structure financial data are replaced in a crypto banking ecosystem by smart contracts and p2p, peer-to-peer, services.

As the world heads to a recession and economic uncertainty, a new, parallel financial system is emerging. It is digital and runs on top of a public, permissionless blockchain ledger: Ethereum.
In contrast to the current financial system, it is open, neutral, and accessible for everyone with an Internet connection. It is radically transparent, in real-time auditable and its rules are written in open source code. It offers us novel, empowering ways for generating the saving and the transmitting of value, with independence from banks. A retail-first system that promises to transform and democratize access to financial services worldwide. 

Simply put DeFi is the collective name given to an ecosystem of financial applications built on top of the blockchain also known as Decentralized Banking. … Within this ecosystem, the users have full control over their assets and they can interact with the ecosystem through decentralized applications (dApps).

  08/01/2020

In the previous issue, we talked about the features and benefits of two distributed Apps that can be accessed via our  BITBROWZE graphical web interface

  1. Real-T for Real Estate Management Offices and proprietors of Realty and,
  2. Xeries for Art Gallery Administrators and proprietors of Fine Art.

Bitbrowze is an interesting initiative. It reminds me of a Swiss Bank account for your transactions.

Sell or Lease anything you own via the Bitbrowze Market page. Manage your properties via the dedicated Bitbrowze/Real-T or the Bitbrowze/Xeries platform.  Your data belongs ONLY to you. No one collects your demographic database because no one but you knows your name or what you look like.

But, as your transaction is public knowledge identified by a serial number in the way a telephone number is public knowledge, that transaction is therefore transparent and above board.

A basic subscription to Bitbrowze.com is free.  You are encouraged to present your properties of Fine art or Real Estate on the Bitbrowze Market Page in a blind Auction. However, you need a wallet in order to get paid for your transaction. If you don’t yet have a wallet simply request one for a small fee. Otherwise, you can use your regular bank account; but then, there goes your anonymity.

The Premium subscription to Bitbrowze.com is paid. Your identifying serial number becomes a member of the xDale Directory. You get a wallet associated with that serial number. You are incentivized to refer like-minded acquaintances. Your membership serial number becomes linked to their’s as an “ancestor”. If they repeat this process your serial number becomes the ancestor to two levels deep, etc.  An ancestor equally gets passive revenue in the form of small referral returns for all transaction three levels deep. 

With Bitbrowze, no one is looking over your shoulder. It’s your exclusive prerogative to declare and pay taxes to your jurisdiction. 

Enjoy the read and stay safe! Best,

Douglas….

-+

Instagram

Bringing the mountain to Mohamed.

Who Needs a Realtor? Really. New York State, for example has toyed with the policy of their complete elimination.

Sellers and buyers alike, bridle at paying Real Estate commissions to realtors. In the case of property sales, we have seen the standard rate dwindle from 6% to 1.5% in some cases. With residential rental transactions, commissions have dwindled from 15% of the first year’s lease to “one month’s” rent.

Realtors insist on earning compensation by means of these commissions which has become a haggling process won usually by the most prestigious brokerages. The individual broker fights a disappointing battle. It is hard to bring Mohamed to this mountain.

Guess what? the Blockchain Phone is here!
With a blockchain phone you won’t need a central service provider to make calls and access the internet.

HTC LAUNCHES ITS BLOCKCHAIN-FOCUSED PHONE, BUT YOU CAN ONLY BUY IT IN CRYPTOCURRENCY … and that is a good thing! Because it is more secure than a ‘burner’ phone, and even more anonymous because when you communicate with a similar device there is no central Phone Company to track your affairs.



HTC’s Exodus 1 comes with a secluded area kept separate from the Android operating system it runs on to keep a customer’s cryptocurrency safe.
The blockchain-based phone is part of HTC’s shifting strategy regarding smartphones, which will prioritize software and intellectual property.
It is available for pre-order at a price of 0.15 bitcoins or 4.78 ether tokens, which translates to about $960, and is expected to be shipped by December.



Q: What is the point of buying a blockchain phone? 
A: Blockchain can be thought of as a tamper-proof digital ledger that records data of transactions across a network that is distributed rather than centralized. Thus, it is a network with no central authority overseeing these transactions.
In the wildest dreams of enthusiasts, these devices will be a gateway to something called the decentralized web, or “Web 3.0.” In this future version of the internet, blockchains and similar technologies would support decentralized applications — “dapps” — that look and feel like the mobile apps we use today but run on public, peer-to-peer networks instead of the private servers of big tech companies. RealT is a dapp.
#1  the significance of integrating blockchain technology in the phone is that it bolsters the security and privacy of a user’s assets, and will in the future help with protecting a customer’s data and identity.
#2 With a blockchain phone you won’t need a central service provider to make calls and access the internet.
To this end,

The Real Estate industry is 99% contractual documents and 1% physical. The Physical aspect is the Construction industry. Realty is actually about the “rights” of ownership and to a lesser degree, rights of agency.. Because 80% of real estate transactions are essentially an exchange of documents like credit reports, applications, deeds, and rental agreements distributed apps convert these to incorruptible smart contracts via new technology. The market for electronic documents coexists easily with traditional paper-based methods. It is simply another arrow in your quiver. With smart contracts there is a reduced need for third party intervention in transactions; This means thousands of dollars in transaction savings. Cross-border transactions are a cakewalk. Transactions are faster by an order of magnitude. Transactions are more transparent and literally immune to fraud. And, so much more.

Why RealT ?

Traditional interactions are notorious for fraud. Consequently, a host of third parties became involved, each with sometimes conflicting and even adversarial interests. As for lawyers, it is often said that lawyers spoil more deals than bad credit. And agents are paid more fees than lawyers in any transaction. The two are natural adversaries.

RealT is a “Smart-contract”. A smart-contract is an App based on an underlying token. All understandings between parties are automated within the code of the app. You do not need a third-party. You certainly do not need a broker. For the property owner or manager, a token is more efficient, faster, transparent, fraud-proof, cross-border, cost-effective, and …so much more.0xf67580838555D2047F5722dc6662cEfD1F97424f Download

How does the Word about RealT spread?

In real estate 90% of business is done by word of mouth. How can this be adapted to the world of social distancing. The answer is Multi-level Marketing.

Harvey Rothschild (paywall) has assumed the position of c.e.o. for the direct marketing division of Rothschild Associates.
We do not advertise. Instead, we have retained Rothschild Associates for the promotion of RealT because most real estate transactions are initiated by word of mouth. The perfect marketing tool is their incorruptible MLM distributed app.

Learn more.

July’s Issue: Our ERC20 Utility Token that employs the STO crowdsource method to sell your properties via https://atlant.io/ .

August’s Issue: Title Archive Tokens. Firstly as a proprietor, you should “Futureproof” the deed to your property.

https://www.yumpu.com/en/account/documentmanager#https://xdale.io/please-introduce-us-and-get-paid/embed/#?secret=QoUxYxSZcq
  1. First, we buy an option on your property.
  2. Second, we do due diligence such as title search.
  3. Third, we tokenize its title, i.e enumerate fractions of its value in the form of tokens.
  4. Fourth, we raise an ICO for the total asking price.
  5. Fifth, the token buyers collectively give you the asking price. You are happy. Goodbye!
  6. Sixth, we promote our token as being a better method. They collectively now own the property. They are not necessarily interested in real estate. They are interested in methods. They are betting that their tokens will increase in value as more and more people realize that this is a better way to move real estate.
  7. Seventh, the token buyer may sell some or all of their tokens at a profit to newcomers.

Our role is to promote methods. Blockchain is, indeed a better method.


JOIN OUR GROUP We welcome your input.

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iProprietor Magazine

Hello

You

You’re a Proprietor, a Property Manager

DEAR PROPRIETOR,

I WOULD LIKE YOU TO CONSIDER USING THE GOODS AND SERVICES OF CROSDALE, inc THAT ARE DESIGNED TO MAKE YOUR REAL ESTATE TRANSACTIONS EASIER, CHEAPER, MORE RELIABLE, MORE UNIVERSAL AND FASTER. FROM YOUR COMPUTER, BUY AND/OR MANAGE YOUR PROPERTIES ANYWHERE ON EARTH SECURELY, PRIVATELY AND, MORE RELIABLY THAN EVER.

Enjoy the read and stay safe! Best, 

This is NOT a Ponzi Scheme. We are not promising miracles. You get ongoing compensation for referrals
realT is a Multi-level Subscription to the XDALE Directory. The first subscriber can choose to “Do Work”; or not. Every subscriber is automatically linked to a unique WALLET with public and private KEYS. “Doing Work” means (1) nominating THREE or more personal acquaintances to become subscribers to realT. (2) Explaining the features and benefits of membership. Once this is achieved the “Work is Done”. The first subscriber then becomes “An Ancestor”. All transactions (to 10 generations of DESCENDANTS) that are done via the XDALE Directory automatically return an AMOUNT to the subscriber’s wallet as well as to his Ancestors’ wallet. The AMOUNT is calculated in fractions of bitcoin or cash per his preference.

Don’t fall for Ponzi schemes and other (pyramid) investment frauds. Those scams promise something for nothing! They also involve paying longer-standing members with money from new participants, instead of actual profits from investing or selling products/services to the public. This cannot be sustained and will always collapse eventually. Protect yourself and your money by steering clear of any “opportunity” bearing warning signs of a Ponzi or pyramid scheme.


Hi Partner,

So You want to send your message to multiple contacts in one fell swoop? Here’s how:

To create your mailing list in Word

  1. Go to File > New > New Document.
  2. Go to Mailings > Select Recipients > Create a New List.
  3. In the Edit List Fields, you’ll see a set of automatic fields that Word supplies. …
  4. Use the Up and Down buttons to reposition fields.
  5. Select Create.
  6. In the Save dialog, give the list a name and save it.

To Create your address labels

  • In Word, click Mailings > Start Mail Merge > Step-by-Step Mail Merge Wizard to start the mail merge wizard. Choose Labels, and then click Next: Starting document. Choose Label options, select your label vendor and product number, and then click OK. Click Next: Select recipients.

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to advertise, Click here

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Templates For Sale

I-T Template Brand
Example of your own App or Site
Browser
That’s required to navigate
Industry
For which the template is targeted
Type
of Template
Detail
description of template
Price
in fiat currency or cryptocurrency
Hypso Any rideshare Website   . Shop
realT1 Metamask or  Mist Realty Rentals Blockchain Ðapps  
Shop
realT2 Metamask or  Mist Realty Sales Blockchain Ðapps  
Shop
realT3 Metamask or  Mist Realty Sales Blockchain Ðapps  
Shop
OurBlock Metamask  or Mist W-o-m Marketing Blockchain Ðapps Marketing
Shop
Real-T: Landlord-Tenant Smart Contract

Posted on 3 Comments

Token Steps

Firstly this token is ownable. Which means we can sell it to a Landlord or his Property Manager.

Function #1 The tenant pays deposit

Function #2 The app checks that the deposit is not overpaid.

Function #3 Landlord withdrawals monthly rent

Function #4 Smart contract Oraclizes (paywall) sensitive customer data to an offline server. This means that the information is offloaded to an Oracle database server on the proprietor’s local computer.

Function #5 The Arbitrator Function remains dormant in case there are future issues between the landlord and tenant.

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A Better Deal

Like a buoy that floats on a bumpy sea the RealT maintains its value as a place marker of value. A 100,000 Realt’s today will buy the same house in 10 years or 100 years because, like a Shock absorber , it floats above inflation. In the illustration above, if Danny wanted Mary’s chair he would need to give her $850 Real-T’s. In future the chair may be worth $1800 in cash but the owner would trade it for the same 850 RealT’s. No inflation. It is optional for them to convert their Real-T’s into government tokens. Why would they? Doing so reintroduces the vulnerabilities of government tokens, such as inflation!?
If someone in future wanted those 850 realT’s they would need to cough up 1800 dollars; because of inflated dollars. The RealT is immune to inflation. However, if the seller insists on cash conversion rest assured that any Real-T can easily be converted.