You can tell when the crypto-market is doing well because people come out of the woodwork asking the same question: When moon?

It’s funny to me, I’ve been in cryptocurrencies since 2013, so I’ve seen the rises and the falls of the market value across all blockchains (And many even disappear entirely). Most people are the same, when the whole market takes a down-turn they’ll get angry at anyone / everyone, even if it’s just the market responding temporarily to some bad news in the midst of a bull-run.

Another one we get asked often is: When Binance?

So let’s talk about Exchanges

Again it’s easy to spot the newbies, because we see “DigiByte needs to be on the worlds largest exchange!”, to which I would ask “Why?”.

The response is the same: “For more people to be able to get their hands on DigiByte”, which loosely translates to “I’m ignoring the 60 other Exchanges you can buy DigiByte on and just focusing on the flavor of the month”.

I was around back when Mt.Gox was hacked early 2014, it was previously flavor-of-the-month.

You see, because so many people haven’t been around terribly long, they’re not aware that Binance is only 9 months old and that the “biggest” exchange has changed almost annually with Bitcoin. Previously we’ve seen Mt.Gox, Poloniex, Bittrex, BitFlyer and now it’s Binance. Tomorrow it will be another, but it’s worth reiterating that we haven’t paid a listing fee for any of those other 60 Exchanges that we’re on, so why would we want to start now?

“For the price!” some people would say, to which I would respond “So you want a pump & dump?”. That’s not something I have any interest in participating in, and anybody is welcome to buy / sell their DigiByte at any time they want.

In the true spirit of a decentralized Blockchain, there’s nothing at all preventing anybody from starting up a fund to do it, you are most welcome to in fact! However I would advise caution: You likely don’t know who you’re giving your DigiByte to, and if you were to donate to something like that, I would personally suggest you count that money as lost no matter what. Unless somebody else notable from the community who has a track record of managing your funds were to come forward and do this, you’re basically putting your faith in a stranger.

So speaking of funds, I want to also take a bit of a moment to talk about PR and the Marketing fund we raised earlier in the year.

Tom Cridland PR

We’d been talking with Tom Cridland for a few weeks, vetting him out, prior to doing the fundraiser.

We engaged Tom Cridland PR, and it’s been great to see he’s been working busily for DigiByte. Unfortunately we’ve had a bear-market across all of Crypto for 4 months now and so general public interest has been a grand sum of zero, in anything crypto related.

Don’t get me wrong, we could have simply taken out Facebook ads (Which you can’t do now) or done a Google Adsense run (Again, crypto ads are also banned there now too), but that wouldn’t have helped. That would amount to a small P&D, before the new investors ran off after mild price gains, happy with their success. We want people who believe in this project long-term, and that’s something we’ve always been unashamedly vocal about!

So we’ve seen the Huffington Post article come out from Tom, which was nice. I know it took him a LOT of back and forth with the editors to get it approved, but he’s relentless in his dedication and so we got there in the end. Unfortunately as I mentioned earlier, public interest in cryptocurrencies is all but gone at this point, unless you’re writing a doom & gloom story about how “Bitcoin has failed”, nobody really cares. Remember, it’s the public we want to get in to DigiByte, they’re the biggest “untapped” market, not another small amount of people who already buy / sell a ton of altcoins every day.

But all hope is not lost!

Quite the opposite in fact, as one astute Reddit user noted in their post, he’s had news stories on a number of major publication sites and is quite well networked. When the time comes, we now have an arsenal of things we can approach the public with through these major news publications when interest ramps up again. This includes things such as the humanitarian efforts we’ve been part of with Venezuela, how Digi-ID is changing the security game, our decentralized non-government model and why it’s important, all that sort of thing!

Clip from the video David Hay sent about what the DigiByte donations accomplished for Venezuela

It’s just there’s little point while we’re in a bear-market, so timing is key too.

We knew it would likely take 6 months given the likely trajectory of the bear-market, so even Jim said in the Marketing channel (Not a direct quote) back in February: Give it 6 months before you want to crucify the decision, until then let’s see what he can pull out of the hat.

Speaking of pulling things out of a hat, we’ve gone and tried something a little different from what we normally would regarding:

Digi-ID!

So although it’s not our usual style, I went and uploaded a video announcing the launch date for Digi-ID, and we’ve even got a website counting down to it which you can see at https://www.digi-id.io

Sign in with Digi-ID, the countdown is on!

So in 3 weeks time we’re going to launch Digi-ID (Although it’s in the wallet beta’s at the moment) and you’ll be able to go to the website and get a bit of information on it, how it works, why it’s cool, where you can try it out etc

We think Digi-ID is going to be a monumental shift in authentication security, and the more we’re talking about this in Telegram, the more we see people agreeing with us as they learn about how it works and why it works. The potential for password-less logins based on the same cryptographic security that keeps your DigiByte (Or Bitcoin) safe, is massive!

We’ve already got basic plugins for Wordpress, phpBB, WHMCS is in-progress, and we’ve got a demo site up too, but we want more!

We need web devs

We want to get Digi-ID on to everything, such as:

Moodle

Joomla

Shopify

ZenCart

CubeCart

Magento

PrestaShop

Drupal

Concrete5

vBulletin

myBB

Simple Machine Forums

RoundCube

SquirrelMail

And anything else you can think of that uses a Username / Email / Phone Number / Password

Yeah it’s quite the list, and it’s not a complete list either. That’s because Digi-ID could be used everywhere!

So if there’s anything that you might be able to assist us with, or a web developer you know, please have them jump in and say hi in our Telegram Dev channel: https://t.me/DigiByteDevelopers

Also, if you’re part of our community and you operate a business or product that allows users to log in, we would love to hear from you to see about integrating Digi-ID! Join us on Telegram for more information.