Bing

For a while now, Microsoft has been trying to make “Bing it” a thing people say. And so far, they’ve been relatively effective – in that highly paid television actors occasionally say it when their lines require them to.

But for the rest of us, “Bing it” likely sits at a far distant place in our vocabulary when in comparison to the much more relevant “Google it”. In fact, a lot of people have made fun of Bing for being the underserved, underused little brother of Google, essentially copycatting its features without the simple looks or effective search mechanics.

But Bing has a lot going for it. Here’s why your business should consider advertising on Bing (and how you can get a $100 coupon by doing so).

Why search engine marketing makes a difference:

Before we get into Bing, let’s talk about why search engine marketing on any platform is a good idea. When a customer is walking down a busy street and sees a billboard, they may not have any interest in the product being shown. And even if they’re a potential customer, it might not be the right time for them to buy.

But when somebody searches for something, you know two things: firstly that they’re looking for that specific item, and secondly that they’re likely ready to buy.

Furthermore, you can actually target the customer’s location in your sales funnel – that is, how close they are to buying – based on the specific words in their search. So “car” might mean they’re still shopping around, whereas “Ford car” might mean they’re investigating specific options, and “Ford car dealership in Monmouth County New Jersey” means they’re probably ready to pull the trigger.

In addition, the results of a search ad campaign are instant, which means it’s trackable and measurable for your business.

So why Bing ads specifically?

It’s no surprise that, for many business owners, advertising on Bing is a distant thought in their minds. But in actuality, advertising on Bing can be a surprisingly powerful option for your business, and the reason why is exactly what we just said: fewer marketers are advertising on Bing.

How Bing beats Google:

You may not realize it, but Bing actually commands an enormous volume of searches each month. Roughly 23% of all online searches happen on Bing (compared to 63% on Google). That represents about 15 billion searches. And use of Bing is growing. From 2017 to 2018, Bing captured 19.7% of US search market share and paid clicks are up – while Google’s paid clicks are down 11% over the same time.

On top of that, Bing is often cheaper than Google Adwords. How much cheaper depends on your keywords and niche, but studies have shown that the number is somewhere between 30% and 40%.

Once you get into the nitty-gritty of the features, Bing has some serious upsides over Google in addition to price. It also allows for more granular campaign selection. You can choose time zones for different campaigns, or can target your ads to exclude desktop and tablet traffic. You can even target specific mobile devices by operating system – helpful if you’re selling iPhone cases or Android charging cables, for example.

Try Bing now with a $100 coupon.

Whatever your business, there are plenty of reasons to advertise on Google. They’re the biggest search engine in the world. But don’t leave Bing out. There are a number of very convincing reasons why it’s worth running ads on their network as well.

If you’re looking to get started, Bing wants to make it easier for you. Sign up now through our link, and they’ll give you a $100 coupon when you spend your first $25.

The post Why You Should Try Bing Ads If You Have A Business appeared first on Wall Street Insanity.

Pixabay

One of Bitcoin’s best and worst traits is that it’s surrounded by misinformation. All right, so that’s mainly “worst” and not “best” but it does add an air of mystery and intrigue into the mix.

The reality is that most people don’t know what bitcoin is or what the blockchain does. For instance, an acquaintance of mine recently announced that he had decided to “get in on bitcoin.”

What he actually meant was, he had chosen to buy some cryptocurrencies, because he wants to be rich without having to do anything. That’s a motivation I can understand, if not respect.

But guess what he said when I asked him which cryptocurrency he had chosen, and why. For the life of him, he couldn’t tell me. What he did say, though, is that, “you have to get started sometime, right?”

That is, in fact, a myth.

So with that spirit in mind, and in honor of fiscally illiterate people the world over, let us expose and bust the 5 worst myths about bitcoin.

Myth #1: Bitcoin is dead.

Let’s get this out of the way right now. Yes, bitcoin has seen some serious loss in value over the last several months. In fact, the price of bitcoin reached a high of almost $20,000 by Mid-December, but then plunged to $6,900 by February.

That’s enough of a drop to make any investor cringe, and it leads to a whole bunch of bitcoin eulogies.

But as we pointed out last week, bitcoin has actually been here before. In 2011 and 2013 bitcoin crashed by 60% or more and eventually recovered. Of course, the past is no real indication of future performance, but it is unlikely that we’ve seen the end of bitcoin just yet.

(Things change quickly, but at the time of writing, bitcoin had recovered to just over $11,000.)

Myth #2: Bitcoin is secure.

Now that we’ve complimented bitcoin on its durability, let’s take it down a peg. It’s not nearly as secure as some would have you believe.

After all, hackers have stolen millions of dollars in Bitcoin. Sometimes these attacks are sophisticated and professional, like when hackers broke into the bitcoin mining marketplace NiceHash and stole $64 million dollars worth of Bitcoins.

… and sometimes a guy breaks into your house and steals your stash, along with a sandwich from your fridge. Or at least that’s the fear that’s prompted Xapo to store their bitcoins in a concrete bunker in Switzerland.

Myth #3: Bitcoin is bad for the environment.

This one is a bit contentious. Recently, a number of prominent media organizations came out with reports on the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining. CNN asked if the bitcoin boom “may be a disaster for the environment.” That’s because this widely cited website shows that Bitcoin’s current estimated annual electricity consumption (51.09 TWh at the time of writing) is roughly equal to all the energy used by the entire nation of Ireland… twice over.

It’s a huge amount of energy and it’s being used to power the computers that are “mining” bitcoin. To give a bit more context here, processing every VISA transaction each year (combined) takes about 1.5% of the energy. One bitcoin transaction consumes 4.5 times the amount of energy used by 100,000 VISA transactions.

Yes, it’s a lot of wasted energy. And then there’s the question of where the mining takes place, and how that region’s electricity is being produced. Most bitcoin miners are in China, where coal and other fossil fuel use is prevalent.

But there are a few arguments to suggest it’s not as bad as all that. Think about the amount of energy required to print bills or stamp coins – never mind the realities of mining gold. This website estimates that mining gold uses a total annual energy consumption equivalent to 123 million barrels of oil – against bitcoin’s 6.6 million barrels. That’s because the gold mining industry is much larger than bitcoin mining, but as long as bitcoin use remains niche so too will its total energy consumption.

On top of that, there are a number of people who don’t buy the bitcoin mining figures I used above. Wired notes that others calculate bitcoin’s mining uses only 4 TWh per year, about a third of the energy used for Christmas lights every year in the United States.

Myth #4: Bitcoin is anonymous.

One of the reasons why libertarians, drug dealers, and privacy wonks love bitcoin is its supposed anonymity. Don’t get me wrong, I am a fervent believer in privacy and our right to it. And I’m not even a libertarian or a drug dealer.

But the reality is that bitcoin is no longer the most anonymous crypto on the blockchain. It’s not even much more anonymous than those performance reviews you were supposed to give teachers at the end of every school year, after they’d spent the last 8 months learning what your handwriting looked like.

Bitcoin is not actually anonymous at all. It’s what is called pseudonymous. The blockchain upon which bitcoin is built is transparent. That means that each transaction is publicly recorded and visible to anyone around the world.

So although your identity is hidden, your transactions are not. And they’re all linked. So if anybody traces one of your transactions, they can link it to anything else you might have bought. Great, now both your wife and your girlfriend know you bought them flowers for Valentine’s Day.

There are ways around this. You can use multiple wallets. You can employ a mixing service. But the best solution might be to just use a cryptocurrency that was developed with privacy at its heart, like Monero.

Monero uses something called a ring signature to help hide the sender and receiver as well as transaction amounts by default. Basically, a ring signature means a group of users could be responsible, but there’s no way to know which key was used.

Myth #5: It’s beyond the reach of the government.

This is another major plus for bitcoin fans, many of whom are inherently skeptical of government control over, well, just about anything.

Bitcoin is decentralized. Which some argue makes it untouchable by governments. Of course, governments can always just ban it. But as the war on drugs has shown, banning something and getting rid of it are two very different things.

Does any government have the power to actually destroy or control bitcoin?

Well, the answer is.. maybe. Back in September, Chinese regulators shut down all exchanges on the mainland. The price tanked but, as we said already, eventually climbed back higher than before.

Nobody really knows what governments are capable of. They like to keep things secret (like Bigfoot, or MKUltra). And governments have often gone to extremes to maintain their control.

So whether or not governments have the power to completely kill bitcoin, they surely have the power to make using it difficult and dangerous. So the question is, does the government have the motivation to try?

Given that one of the main perceived advantages of a cryptocurrency is that it keeps your money out of the hands of the government, then the government may have little choice but to act, eventually.

Whatever bitcoin’s fate, which nobody really knows anyway, the blockchain is likely here to stay. Just don’t get fooled into believing the myths floating around out there, especially if you’ve got money riding on it (even if, like my friend, you’re not sure which one you bought).

The post 5 Myths About Bitcoin That Need To Die appeared first on Wall Street Insanity.

Andre Francois on Unsplash

If you’ve been anywhere near a television, Twitter, or Reddit in the last month or so, you’ve probably come across legions of stricken crypto-investors. Facing the near cataclysmic collapse of Bitcoin prices, many have chosen to HODL (and hopefully their pseudo-retirement plans weren’t based on second mortgages or pawned family heirlooms.)

But despite the bitpocalpyse, it’s not the end of the crypto world. It’s not even the end of the crypto concept. That’s because both the mandate and the goal of cryptocurrencies is still valid. So, does bitcoin still matter? Even if bitcoin never climbs back to its December 2017 peak (and John McAfee is never forced to eat his own genitals on live television), it’s unlikely that bitcoin’s day has come.

But before we rush to prognostications of doom, let’s retrace bitcoin’s origin story.

Where did bitcoin come from?

The most famous of the cryptocurrencies, bitcoin has become something of a face for the new wave of technology. So much so that many outside the chamber confuse the coin itself with its underlying principle, the blockchain.

First launched in 2009 by the mysterious and still-anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto (Twitter rumors circulate daily), bitcoin was designed as the world’s first decentralized digital currency.  Using a peer-to-peer network, bitcoin was designed to cut out the middleman.

Instead of relying on a credit card, a bank, and a national government backing a fiat currency, the idea behind bitcoin is that a distributed ledger, or blockchain, will record every transaction publicly, in a way that is unalterable. Thus, a system where trust is no longer required.

In the case of bitcoin, removing the middleman did not actually mean removing the fees (your credit card also charges a fee, remember, which is usually paid by the merchant). In fact, as bitcoin’s value rose the fees also climbed. By December 2017, they had peaked at between $20 and $30 a transaction – enough to put a serious kink in the concept of bitcoin as a new currency.

This is only one of the many problems that bitcoin has encountered as a means of buying goods or services. It’s ponderously slow. And of course, its price fluctuates wildly, and nobody seems to know why (or where it will go next).

Bitcoin’s price crashes.

On January 1, 2017, the price of bitcoin was a few dollars shy of $1,000 USD. This represented a strong growth since its inception, but the fun had yet to truly begin. The price of bitcoin climbed steadily through the year, and by the middle of December 2017 it reached almost $20,000 per coin.

That’s a 1,800% growth. To put it another way, every $100 invested in January was worth almost $2,000 twelve months later. If you’d had the foresight to invest $10,000, by the end of the year you would now be worth almost $200,000.

That is if you got your money out in time.

Only a few weeks after its December high, the price of bitcoin began to plummet. By early February 2018, it reached $6,900. And now, as of February 12, it’s climbed back up to $8,900.

Can bitcoin recover?

Now, that’s still a 793% growth in just over a year. Most investors would sell both legs and a few fingers for those kinds of returns. But it also means that Bitcoin has fallen 64% from its peak to its bottom last week.

Those are the kind of swings that iron-stomached investors can endure, but it’s hard to base a functioning currency around movement this extreme.

And in the case of bitcoin, this isn’t particularly out of form. In fact, bitcoin has crashed by 60%+ twice before now, once in 2011 and once in 2013. Each time, it eventually recovered.

So it’s with good reason that Paul Krugman of the New York Times recently called bitcoin a giant bubble that would eventually end in grief. But, he stated, it’s more than that. It’s also wrapped in “techno-mysticism inside a cocoon of libertarian ideology.”

But why do people even care about bitcoin in the first place?

It’s hard to understand exactly what bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and alt-coins mean to those who support them and have banked their nest eggs on them. A trip down certain subreddits and Twitter feeds reveal a group of people who cling (or HODL) fanatically to assets for which any real investor information simply does not exist.

And in many cases, it looks like wild swings in value are the result of attempts at intentional manipulations. Group chats on Telegram and other places host conversations where less scrupulous participants attempt to drive up the price of cryptocurrencies in the hopes of attracting outside buyers – only to exit abruptly with their ill-gotten gains.

Despite the obvious shortcomings of bitcoin (to wit: extreme volatility, untenably high fees, ponderously low transaction times, and a lack of any real utility), the underlying premise of the blockchain (and its related technologies like the Tangle) remains clearly valid.

Back in January 2017, before bitcoin and the crypto world embarked on its roller-coaster ride of wealth and disaster, the Harvard Business Review explored the blockchain. In the article, writers Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani envisioned a world where lawyers, brokers, and bankers had become obsolete.

To quote their patient optimism, “while the impact will be enormous, it will take decades for blockchain to seep into our economic and social infrastructure.” In time, the authors argued, the blockchain could become the new TCI/IP – the protocol initially looked on with skepticism, which now powers much of the modern internet.

The fate of bitcoin is unavoidable.

All of this means that bitcoin is likely ultimately doomed. As Paul Krugman points out, if bitcoin were a currency, it would have experienced an annual inflation equivalent to roughly 8,000%.

That’s not quite as bad as Zimbabwe’s 500 billion percent inflation, but about double the 4,068% inflation Venezuela experienced over the last year.

Instead, it seems far more likely that bitcoin’s successors, designed to deal with its flaws in more productive ways, with clearly defined use cases will prevail. Monero is far more anonymous and five times faster. Iota requires no mining and has no fees. In fact, the more people use Iota, the faster its network becomes, as each user must verify two previous transactions, giving it a theoretically unlimited ability to scale.

Nobody can tell you whether your remaining bitcoins will ever be worth what you paid for them if you jumped on the bandwagon back in December. But it seems very likely that the blockchain is here to stay.

The post What Is Bitcoin And Does It Still Matter? appeared first on Wall Street Insanity.