Gold ETF, Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Altcoin? One of Each Please....

September 1st, and we sit and wait in anticipation of the beginning of the much discussed Trump USA / China tariffs. Wait! Haven't those already begun? Nooooooooo - that starts on Tuesday my good friend! So, sit back, enjoy your Labor Day, maybe have a beer, look at your online portfolio at night after replying to pre-workweek emails, and rest easy Monday night after you Amazon Prime and chill. You're good, right? Oh, I wish it were so. I'm a cautious optimist. I drive my friends nuts with my predictions of what's right around the corner...but you know? I'm usually correct!

Ok, so let's maintain the spirit of my last post and not try to write people into a mercurial and lachrymose state of mind. I want to instill hope, but first.... It's Labor Day weekend! We have much to reflect on during our day off!

The downside: Student loan debt is well over $1 trillion; consumer AND corporate debt is at an all time high; the entire housing market is well overheated, and US city officials (especially on the expensive West Coast) are enabling once upscale neighborhood to be destroyed by blatant drug use, unenforced crime, and urban blight. Just look at Los Angeles, San Francisco, and expensive downtown Seattle for evidence. And this trend is rapidly spreading around the country like virus. Does anyone here see a second, more locally devastating housing bubble in the making? I do. AND, starting Tuesday, our friendly neighborhood tariffs go into effect! USA USA! The Almighty Dollar, right? 'Sitting pretty in our 401K's, SEPs, and savings! Everything's fine, we all still have access to the most trusted form of fiat in the world. You're good bro! INSERT RECORD SCRATCH HERE

My grandfather told me to never rest on my yannis, I mean laurels. I suppose that's when I became a "cautious optimist". How can I recover any optimism after that second paragraph?

The upside: We live in interesting and exciting times, peoples. I don't need to tell you that your number 1 priority is to get out of that debt. So, rest up on Labor Day, and hit the ground running Tuesday morning ready to be as productive as ever at the office - whether that "office" be behind a desk, behind the wheel, or behind a piano. Sharpen your skills, separate yourself from the competition, and look hard for opportunities to help you eliminate your student loans, car notes, and credit card bills. And stay out of debt! (Auto Zone exists to keep that old car running). But, we're going to split the atom here and give you a second number 1 priority - just as important as the aforementioned. INVEST IN CRYPTOCURRENCIES and METAL ETF's. Not a lot - start at the minimum (often $25 per month). Cryptocurrencies* such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, LiteCoin, and AltCoins such as ROKS Stablecoins are real, and here to stay. *That e-buzzword from 2017 is no longer to be scoffed at, or brushed off at the water cooler. I also highly recommend venerable metal Exchange Traded Funds such as GLD and SIVR. You can get those on E*TRADE for example. *Online brokerages will also set up a small auto-debit from your account.

Let's wrap it up, I've got a steak to marinate for tomorrow. What did we learn today? Be open to alternate forms of investing. Yes, invest in one of those ETFs, but be open minded to the future of money in the form of cryptocurrencies. The ROKS Stablecoin is tied to the more familiar Ethereum. And Ethereum was designed as an open-source code on the blockchain to ease the coupling of altcoins. For example: the ROKS Stablecoin, coupled to Ethers, is perhaps the most innovative crypto-token created to streamline the sending of money to and from your families, anywhere in the world.

See you after the holiday weekend! 'Hope you already purchased that new appliance (Home Depot still open for another hour here).

NOTE: The Author does not officially endorse Amazon, Home Depot, E*Trade, or AutoZone.

Stable Coins - the Mite of Modernity

Not a misprint of 'might', not a tiny arthropod....Did any biblical scholars pick up on this? Of course! The widow's mite mentioned in the gospel of Mark, chapter 12: But a poor widow put in two very small copper coins, worth only a few cents. Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, "Truly I tell you, this poor woman has put more into the treasury than all the others" (NIV). How could I (dare I?), and why would I connect theology in with crypto-numismatics? Simply stated: the stable coin is one of the most ancient stores of "temporary" wealth known to man. This is not a new concept "coined" by the slickest speakers on the crypto stage. (Those mites are worth quite a bit nowadays due to their rarity - more on that later). The fact is that whether we're transferring our "earned wealth" locked in the form of paper cash, checking and savings accounts, lady liberties, or a talent of gold - that wealth, or "worth", has satisfied the objective sought after by two entities - a product for an agreed upon unit-of-worth. I'm not referring to the word "worth" in the sometimes pejorative sense of someone's "net worth". I think of a unit of worth as a calorie - a unit of energy stored up in our bodies, ready to be burned! If you've completed a task, you're earned a Uw: unit of worth. If you've consumed a donut, you've "earned" a calorie (or more), if you've captured the electrons transferred through the friction of two moving parts, you've "earned" a V - volt. Much like a volt can be stored up in a battery, and a calorie in our fat, our Uw's (my own abbreviation which you'll run across again), can be stored up in more ways today than ever imagined possible.

Now, enter the digital coin decade of the 20-teens. Let's just assume for this article's purpose that our mites of yester-millenia are now worth 100 cents given the rate of inflation. We have a mite tied to the Uw of a single USD. 'Hard to find an individual good valued at a buck these days, so our Uw is relatively analogous to our beloved widow of Mark chapter 12. This modern mite, or crypto-mite, has taken the form of the stable coin - a digital stable coin to be precise. Inasmuch that a mite will hold the value of the agreed-upon Uw measured against 1 USD, our stable coin begins it's life as an agreed-upon Uw measured against one United States dollar. SIMPLE, PERFECT, right! [Side story]: I gave a guy a dollar once apologetically thinking I should give more, and he replied, "Hey man, a buck's a buck!" Until it's 'worth only a few cents'. That's a dystopian thought, right? Stay with me, I'm not writing to instill fear, or to inspire feelings of lugubriousness. I'm writing to implant hope into our endless story of inflation!

Of course the dollar will slip! It happens each and every year. But never fear, we live in an enlightened age of digital decentralized currency - fully tender-able, when crypto coins are weened off of the dollar, and evolved into a trusted, guaranteed, 100% Ethereum backed currency - a cryptocurrency in the form of a digital stable coin transferred from smart wallet to smart watch, phone, tablet, drive, cloud, etc..

If our biblical figure donated those same 2 mite-coins in 2019, the beneficiary would be $2 million dollars all the richer from the pure numismatic perspective (another subject). Let's just hope rich and poor will continue their own humble benevolence well into our third millennium.

For the time being, I can envision a (near) future when we transfer a ROKS stable coin, for example, from payer to payee. A digital coin, which by then will have proven itself as a fully independent, and trustworthy Uw - more than a few mites, a modern "shekel" of bronze.

The Best Way to Participate in the ROKS Revolution

You can be a Master Evangelist.

What is a Master Evangelist?

A Master Evangelist (ME) owns a geographic territory. Within this territory, the ME gets at least 0.3% and at most 1% of all ETH transactions.

Here's how it works.

You can own the fee rights to the Local Token Smart Contract for the Geographic Territory where you want to be the ME. Local Token smart contracts are all owned by RockStable, but you can own the fee rights to those smart contracts. Here's what you get for being the ME of a Geographic Territory (GT), which can be a town or a city:

1. You can form your own "army" of subordinate evangelists who will go out and spread the installation of the MainSale app in your GT; you don't have to do all the work.

2. Why would anybody sign up as an evangelist in your territory (GT)? Each evangelist can earn 0.7% of every ETH transaction processed through every MainSale app instance that she installs.

3. You earn 0.3% of every ETH transaction processed through all the MainSale app instances installed by your subordinate evangelists.

4. If a vendor installs the MainSale app on her own, you become the default evangelist and you earn the full 1% of fees for all ETH transactions through this self-installed MainSale app.

5. Smart vendors can assign themselves to be an evangelist in addition to being a vendor. In this case, these vendors only pay 0.3% in transaction fees, which all goes to you.

Note: the system does not charge transaction fees for ROKS transactions, only for ETH transactions. In version 2, customers will be able to pay using popular cryptocurrencies other than ETH, and in this case you would still get your 0.3% or 1%.