My brother Spectral and I (BitSpace) got invited to speak at FSCONS in November 2015. We applied with the following text:

Bitshares as an example of "Bitcoin 2.0", and how blockchain technology can be used as a new platform for a lot of other services than just money/currency; the development and emergence of an entire ecosystem based on blockchain technologies. Manuel Lains will present a lot of practical solutions and applications for current social and economic problems. Christian Lains will present and discuss larger political and philosophical issues related to blockchain technologies.

We are now informed that we will be getting two 45 minute sessions, for a total of 90 minutes. We welcome any suggestions on how to divide the presentation and what might be good things to discuss. You can see our last presentation here.

This time we hope to be better prepared and I feel happy to be able to grow with each new experience, this being the third that we will do. The challenge is to prepare something that is inspirational, philosophically deep and still interesting with nuanced details.

CHALLENGE

"Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once." - William Shakespeare

Most psychological and spiritual growth is the result of challenges. In particular real challenges that stretch your self-concept, skills, beliefs and mental or physical capacities. Real challenges are brought about when there is a greater demand from yourself and your environment. It's those moments when your skills and best efforts are called upon, and you must push your will, strength and courage to keep up. When the right challenges are presented you can enter a state of flow where your sense of time and self-consciousness melts away; when you're in that zone you feel your best, preform your best and grow as a human being.

But how do we choose the right challenges - the real challenges? First of all, challenges are not simply goals. A goal focuses on the extrinsic purpose of the action, we can achieve a goal without enjoying it, without feeling that it is significant, without growing and without feeling challenged. Second, even if we realize that achievement of the goal changes things, that does not mean it is progress - we can change a lot of things about our lives, and brag about all the changes we're undergoing, without any genuine progress being made.

The stress we feel in life is rarely related to real challenges, the kind that stretches our abilities and makes us feel engaged and growing. So whatever mundane murmur of "do to-do" we get from our surroundings, it's important to rise above and activate real challenges in a way that brings back the zest of engagement and progress in our lives. With that said, lets jump into the practical steps we can take to set real challenges.

Choose Fulfilling Challenges

Choosing a trivial challenge is no good. We need challenges that we find fulfilling, challenges that are inspiring and meaningful. Here I list five different point to keep in mind when choosing a challenge.

#1 Find a challenge that activates a state of flow

In general terms we should aim for these are activities that challenge your whole being - requiring singular focus, and forcing you to pay undivided attention and concentration to the task at hand.

#2 Find a challenge that stretches your efforts and capabilities.

Step outside your comfort zone! Find something that is just beyond your current abilities, something that requires you not only to engage fully, but to grow and learn with the challenge.

#3 Find a challenge where you can score performance.

Build progress checks into your challenges - it forces you to be realistic, exposes you to outside influence, makes it easier to feel what you are doing and creates a sustainable habit.

#4 Find challenges that have a sense of completion

There needs to be light at the end of the tunnel, especially when you are tackling huge challenges. Allow yourself to have pride in your achievements.

#5 Find challenges that allow sharing of experiences and achievements

Talking about and celebrating your achievements with others is important for our feelings of fulfillment. If we are all alone in our achievements, they can feel empty and hallow. This also means we should seek out friends and environments where pride in achievements and celebration is encouraged rather than frowned upon.

Focus on the Journey and Don't Fear Rejection

Two mental villains of setting new challenges is unmet expectations and a paralyzing fear of rejection.

We help to slay the first villain by noting that when we consider the reason for doing something, the why of it all, we should not focus on the extrinsic reward of our actions, i.e. the expected outcome or destination, rather we should focus on the intrinsic rewards associated with the journey. When taking up a challenge, learn to enjoy the process and your own effort - true celebration is as much of the heroic struggle as it is of the treasure uncovered at the end.

To help slay the second villain we should note that rejection is extremely rare. The kind of rejection people fear, associated with a break-up or being fired from a job for lack of skill, occurs only a few times in life, and meanwhile we encounter hundreds if not thousands of people who are encouraging and enthusiastic about our potential progress and even sympathize with our struggles and failures when they occur.

And even when the occasion rejection occurs, do we pay attention to that above everyone else? Or do we chose to ignore or at best sympathize with the mean spirit that tries to tear us down?

BitSpace Delegate Proposal

By Christian Lains and Manuel Lains

BitSpace is a project by Christian and Manuel Lains that aims to improve financial and political freedom for the individual, leveraging novel technologies for full transparency and accountability. BitSpace will engage a Norwegian community on the benefits of blockchain based solutions, hosting workshops and making presentations as well as consulting with comsumers, developers and investors. The first business-oriented plan by BitSpace is to launch BitGate, a gateway for Norwegians onto the BitShares’ decentralized exchange.

Who are we?

Manuel and Christian both live in Oslo, Norway. We are brothers who have been enthusiastic about cryptocurrencies and blockchain based solutions for the past 3 years.

Manuel Lains (‘Spectral’) is an electronics and computer engineer by profession. He is a strong believer in the sovereignty of the Internet, decentralized power, and the possibilities that cryptocurrency technology bring to the world. Back in 2012 he took part in starting up the Norwegian Pirate Party. Recognizing the “soft transition” opportunity towards Internet Sovereignty that the party represents, he is still actively involved. Lately, his focus has been on figuring out how blockchain technology can help the Pirate Party and vice versa.

Christian Lains (‘CLains’) is a philosophy major and futurist who tends to notice global cultural trends as they emerge. This foresight led him into Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies at an early stage. He has been obsessively active in the BitShares community since late 2013, along the way being trusted with access to the Bitshares website, managing community bounties and writing for the BitShares wiki. Christian is currently transcribing the weekly dev. hangouts and evangelizing.

For a closer look at who we are, please read our biographies at bitspace.no

What have we been doing?

We decided to start BitSpace back in January 2015 and have been working on various things since then.

Manuel set up a DevShares delegate (dvs1.bitspace) in February, and has been working to understand BitShares on a technical level. Manuel has been working with Adam Ernest of Follow My Vote to see if their voting solution can be used for the Pirate Party in Norway or other countries. The Norwegian Pirate Party invited Adam in March to their annual assembly, and in the future we might see a collaboration between the Pirate Party and Follow My Vote. See our BitSpace blog for more information.

Manuel and Christian jointly wrote a proposal on Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies for the Pirate Party National Assembly that was voted in close to unanimously. This proposal was a call to action for the Pirate Party to increase their focus on Bitcoin, Cryptocurrencies and other blockchain based solutions to help work for a sensible regulatory environment that promotes blockchain based innovation. An English translation of the proposal is available for download here, and Manuel’s original presentation of the proposal at the assembly is available at BitSpace’s YouTube here.

We have also made a couple of presentations on Crypto. The first presentation was held during a Bitcoin meetup, where Manuel discussed the recent cryptocurrency-related development at the Pirate Party, and Christian discussed the BitShares platform and DACs as a potential for future innovations. The second presentation was held at the Open Source Developers Conference Nordic. We talked about Bitcoin/Bitcoin 2.0, BitShares as a platform/exchange, and Peertracks. The presentation is up on BitSpace’s Youtube here.

Christian has been learning about marketing and webdesign and has set up various websites to get the BitShares word out. Apart from the BitSpace website, bitspace.no, Christian is operating libertymotive.com, a website and that mixes and ties motivational literature to the crypto revolution, and freebitgold.com which aims to draw in people searching for all BitGold alternatives and highlight BitShares as the most decentralized and free alternative. Check out the FreeBitGold facebook page! Christian is also just finishing up the Norwegian translation of the book ‘BitShares 101’.

What will we be doing?

We have a number of plans going forward, and we list four of them here.

First, we will provide value to BitShares and the ecosystem by participating actively, evangelizing where we can and making the right connections in meatspace. These are all default services that it can be hard to quantify, except when breakthroughs happen, such as getting invited to OSDC or getting Adam invited to Norway.

Second, we will be working for and with the local Norwegian scene, which includes hosting meetups, launching BitGate/BitPortal and communicating with users, developers and potential investors. When BitShares is ready, converting developers, users and investors may be as little as a phone call and a coffee away, and we will be ready for those opportunities.

Third, we will produce content to serve as inbound marketing - articles and videos primarily. Christian and Manuel are learning quickly what it takes to communicate the right ideas to get people hooked and involved, and we aim to do things that scale to a larger audience. The BitShares community is a high output machine of great ideas and we need people to package and repackage these ideas to the right audience both globally and locally.

Finally, we will do “community services” like running up-to-date Witnesses with price-feeds for DevShares and BitShares, having an up-to-date slate with our best suggestions and sharing tips, connecting with potential partners, sharing our points of view on the forum and sharing successful marketing strategies. We will also be in talks with the other workers to help organize the BitShares ecosystem, and pledge at least 10% of our delegate pay to a BitShares commons fund (see section on "Worker Pay").

Witness and Decentralization

Our witness is running on a dedicated Virtual Private Server hosted by a local Norwegian service provider. The hardware is physically located in Norway and managed by BitSpace. By maintaining our servers in the same jurisdiction as ourselves, we hope to help maximize decentralization for BitShares as a whole.

We also think alliances with political parties (e.g. The Pirate Party) that value internet freedom will help bring public awareness in the event authorities try something unethical in the future.

Our witness is running the BitShares Client compiled on and for the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS operating system.

The technical specs of our server is currently:

• Single Core CPU
• 2GB RAM
• 50GB SSD

When the demand for hardware resources increases we have a server on standby with higher specs:

• Dual Core CPU
• 4GB RAM
• 100GB SSD

We believe that ‘bitspace-clains’ will satisfy the core demands that witnesses should be trusted, transparent, and decentralized.

Transparency

Everything we do at BitSpace will be posted at the Blog on the website. The witness server will provide real-time feeds of relevant statistics, and interesting network events will be posted here and on the BitShares forums.Each week we will give full reports on BitSpace activities, what has been working, what has not been working, and what we are going to do the next week. This will be posted on the BitSharesTalk forums as well as on http://bitspace.no/bitspace-weekly-updates/

Accountability

We will keep track of prominent metrics on how we are doing, including the server status of the witness, numbers of hits on our articles, videos, websites, and social media, as well as how many leads we are getting, and how many go on to sign up for BitShares. We’re open to community input and will answer any questions the community might have on the forums.

Long Term Business Plan

We aim to create a self-sustainable business based on expanding BitGate/BitPortal, marketing efforts, and our ability to guide people and consult businesses through this new, emerging sector. We will position ourselves as the leading BitShares hub here in Oslo, Norway, and get in contact with VCs and aspiring young entrepreneurs who are considering blockchain technology as an option. Having a worker in place will give us further weight to pitch BitShares as the next level, sustainable blockchain platform.

Worker Pay

We will not sell or spend the worker pay, but keep it locked up in the expectation that BitShares grows to what we believe it can be. This provides an incentive for us to work hard, without causing any downward pressure on the BitShares market cap. Every month we will short bitUSD to increase our exposure to BitShares which will further diminish the available supply. We will remain committed to this payment structure until BitShares reaches a market cap of at least $100 million.

We will also take the initiative to build a BitShares Emergency Fund funded by workers. The thought is that participating workers set aside a percentage of the worker pay to create a fund dedicated to address urgent issues in the BitShares ecosystem. These funds can be released by shareholder vote to resolve issues for the common good.

Feedback

We welcome feedback from the community! We are both resourceful people who have a lot of time on our hands now to make things happen. So please reply here, send us a PM or reach out to us via email if you have any questions, concerns or suggestions. Feel free to get in contact via Skype ('clains', 'antakeli') or FB (Christian, Manuel) as well!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKW4UmvbwKU

What do you guys think?

I've been listening a lot to Peter Schiff over the past months, but recently with Greece and Puerto Rico it feels like the pressure is really building.. I'm not the type to be paranoid or gloomy, and I know I only recently got into reading about economy, but the stakes are really high here, so if there's even a small chance it should be given enormous weight. Ron Paul was on the Alex Jones show before Schiff, and he's pretty much saying the same things.

In my experience people are generally bad at facing uncomfortable things, and even when they know something at an intellectual level, their actions are still often rooted in the false reality where everything is still fine. You could see it in Greece; people knew on some level that the banks were going to close well in advance, or at least that there was a good chance, and yet it was only after the banks closed that people seemed to realize the gravity of the situation.

https://youtu.be/DaxKbATmTCE?t=21s

Was it Stan who came up with 'Graphene'? 

Connection

We all want to feel connected to those around us. Your friendships have as much bearing on your happiness in life as does the kind of work you do or the amount of money you make. True, lifelong happiness comes from connecting with and loving others, so it's best we figure out how to do that as soon as possible and as best we can.

Activator #1: Define and Design Your Ideal Relationships

It might be useful to begin with the end in mind in your relationships - to define what you want and to endeavor to bring it into existence, so consider: What kinds of friends do I want, exactly? What kinds of lovers do I want? And how shall I attract, keep, and deepen my relationships with them?

Activator #2: Practice Positive Projection

You get what you look for: If you project positive traits and expectations onto others, not only do you notice positive traits more often, but people also tend to live up to them. When people are told that they are unusually attentive, charming, and pleasant, they themselves will start behaving that way; they will see the tired or distracted behavior as anomalous rather than as a rule about who they are. When you live your life believing that people are generally good and interesting, you will find the good and interesting aspects of every person you interact with.

In this way you stop seeing others as obstacles or competitors and instead see them as teammates or valued opponents on the road of life. When you cast someone in the negative light of "competitor," you immediately see them as an obstacle to your achieving what you want. You inject scarcity into your view of others. But when you view someone as a worthy opponent, you recognize their strengths and see understand that it is those very strengths that will help you and challenge you to engage your own strengths.

Activator #3: Find and Cultivate "Growth Friends"

The old adage is true: You can't chose family, but you can choose friends. In study after study, researchers from a variety of disciplines continually find that the quality of our immediate friendship-based relationships is one of the most important factors in determining our overall stability, mood, ambition, emotional range, growth and satisfaction in life.

Consider these questions to get an overview of your own peer group:

1. How many close, real friends do you have?
2. How often do you see them in person?
3. How often do you speak with them?

On a scale of 1 to 5,

4. How well do these close friends really know you?
5. How much do these close friends consistently encourage you to chase your dreams?
6. How much do these friends provide you with insight, information, and inspiration that challenge you to be a better person?
7. How much fun do you have when you hang out with these friends?

You might immediately see the value of categorizing your friends into old friends, maintenance friends, and growth friends. Focus more on growth friends - people who you are actively engaged with, can grow with and that energize your life - and try to lift whoever you can of your old and maintenance friends by sharing your true thoughts, feelings, and ambitions in life and for your immediate and distant future.

The way to cultivate growth friends is to be one. Role-model the types of relationships you want in life. You want love? Then be a supremely loving human being and you will find and feel love. You want real friendship? Be a passionately interested friend who brings novelty, joy, caring, adventure, and closeness to others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS5P_LAqiVg

CARING

The capacity to care and be cared for is a human strength and virtue. The more humanly connected, caring, and emotionally engaged we are, the more we enjoy reaching for new levels of excellence.

For various reason, and throughout life, we can get cut off from our ability to care and stay connected to others. We can get anxious, overwhelmed or stuck in instant gratification loops. When this happens, life will end up grey, one-sided and dull, making us apathetic or even depressed.

To activate the drive for caring try one of these activators:

#1 Care for Thyself

Sleep - get a good night sleep every day.
Eat healthy -  enjoy the feeling of getting nutritious energy for your mind and body
Exercise - get into the habit of pursuing strength, flexibility and energy.
Meditate - reset your mind every day.
Stay hydrated - take a break, fresh water can heal a heavy head

#2 Be More Vulnerable and Allow Others to Care for You

Ask for help, open yourself up to letting others help you, support you, mentor you, encourage you - care for you.

#3 Be more Present, Interested and Attentive to Others

When we are we meet people who are truly present with us, we take notice. We can tell that they want to be here with us right now.

Try this simple test on coworkers, friendly and family members and see how many you can answer,

This person's top three ambitions in life are to...
This person's favorite artist is...
This persons' three closest friends are named..
This persons' three best experiences in life were...
This person's favorite meal is...
This person would absolutely love to own a...

How did you do?

Remember that the only way to experience the deepest levels of human experience is to be deeper in the moment in our interactions with others, fully invested in the now, with them alone. All of us want someone to care who we are and what we think and feel. That's why we all should see everyone in the world as having a sign hung around their neck that reads, PLEASE LISTEN TO ME AND VALUE ME.