In light of developments in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, a Coin News correspondent has managed to discuss with Serge Schout regarding how a Bitcoin enthusiast navigates around the market.
The Bitcoin Journey
I first heard about Bitcoin in 2008-2009 at university. Some of my friends were talking about it. I wanted to know more and began to do some research. Having done some solid investments in stocks in the past, I was really weary at first of Bitcoin. Like most of the people that were confronted with this new currency, I was having a “wait and see” mentality.
This mentality was basically because of the lack of information out there and I was at university; I also had other obligations. One of these obligations was being the official appointed student representative of the Humanities faculty by the university. This position I held for a couple years.
Nevertheless I kept some tabs on the Bitcoin news and innovation the whole time. Not necessarily every day but I would check BTC news every two weeks. After time progressed I began to get more interested in the technology behind Bitcoin; namely the Blockchain technology.
I think, and this is a personal opinion, that the Blockchain technology can be a great contribution and even excellent solutions to some problems. For example: Blockchain is basically an open ledger system that everyone can search. This allows openness and can be a deterrent for people that want to skim some money from the company that they are employed at. But there are numerous other purposes for the Blockchain technology. Another such example is the possibility to track medication from the pharmaceutical company to destination. I did an article about that a couple of weeks ago concerning the usability of the Blockchain and implementation in some sectors.
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Another aspect that draws me to Bitcoin and crypto in general, is the free flow of ideas. It doesn’t matter if you are: religious, homosexual, skin colour, political alignment, etc. everyone is welcome to voice their ideas and nobody has been killed for their beliefs or background, though there have been some serious heated discussions about Bitcoin and altcoins or the regulatory or non-regulatory stance. However, scammers in the crypto world should be watching their backs because if they bamboozled people out of their hard earned crypto it might get violent. But that is the general sentiment that nearly everyone has that has been scammed.
On Launching the Business
Well we were talking about creating a news website for a long time. If I had to pinpoint a specific month/year on the actual plans, I would say that is was in the end of September, early October 2013. My co-founder and I were both quite knowledgeable about the whole crypto world because we were active in the crypto world. We wrote articles for different news outlets, sometimes under different names because the people that ran those sites wanted it to be so.
I did a lot of translations and proof reading as well as writing articles. However there came a point that we saw that certain news sites were “hyping” certain altcoins and even Bitcoin purposefully. I will not point fingers to said news outlets because those problems are fixed (sort of).
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We thought that we could do a far better job at reporting news in an objective way. Having studied at 2 universities, I knew how to proceed so I taught my co-founder the guidelines of objective reporting. One of the prime rules is that you add source material in there. However the art in real objective reporting is to know which sources are trustworthy and which aren’t.
Now the difficulties that we were confronted with were not so much the labelling of our site but the design. Some designs came out great on a desktop but on handheld devices it was just awful. That was what consumed most of our time actually.
Now when CryptoArticles was running, we had to screen certain messages. For example there were a lot of people that mentioned websites or links that didn’t have anything to do with the article that my co-founder or I wrote. This added a lot more work than we anticipated but we managed to do calculate it in in our work schedule.
In March 2015, we received a wonderful offer from some investors that wanted to expand the news site more and we accepted said offer. Both my co-founder and I were running the site nearly the whole time. So that is a great indicator that we know what we are doing. Also our news reporting was appreciated by a lot of people; some days we had from +-2000 up to 4500 unique visitors a day.
To be continued…
