Your government is a Ponzi scheme.
Yes, we’re talking about all governments.
Think of all the money being printed out by the central bank just to cover all the debt that’s being incurred, while they’re simultaneously encouraging more investors to enter the system. It’s a long cycle of paying earlier investors with funds from recent investors, and all that debt gets transferred to the shoulders of the general public.
Yes, people like you.
So much social engineering goes into making sure that you are controlled by money. The truth is it’s just a piece of paper.
“It's no longer actual, like a certificate to trade it back in for gold or something else. It's a note. It's debt. We're just, we're throwing debt around, you work so someone else can print more and make your work worth less,” Alexander explained.
As the system grows, more people join, earn debt, and pay back into it. The people issuing are the ones who get more funds. The ones at the top are earning big.
The one thing that the government cannot regulate, no matter how hard they try, is trade. Trade is incredibly dynamic and grows alongside humans. It adapts and comes from all different areas. It’s a core human activity—one that TARTLE is passionate about preserving.
Your existence is highly improbable. Imagine the long list of successful choices your ancestors make so that you could become a living, breathing, and thinking being.
Going through the daily motions of working, eating, and sleeping can make it difficult to think of the bigger picture. But you deserve to have opportunities where you can connect, find meaning, and explore the world around you.
No false sense of scarcity. No limits.
TARTLE was made to allow that sense of independence and connection. On this platform, all transactions occur exclusively between a buyer and a seller. Everything on the platform comes with no strings attached and was made because someone worked hard to create it. Conversely, everything you bring to the platform is borne out of your own efforts. You will get paid for your hard work and no one else.
Transact in truth. Act with power. It’s time to step out of that cage.
Sign up for TARTLE through this link here.
Let’s use history and the evolution of technology to talk about adoption rates.
In the past, technological development was heavily associated with warfare. Private enterprise was the driving force behind the transformation of longbows and broadswords to trebuchets and siege engines.
Notice how this meant that development was placed in the hands of the wealthy and the influential. Today, we ask ourselves: what happens when the tech advantage is given to individuals?
What if the ordinary people are empowered, through technology, to rise above being pawns of the one percent?
One of the biggest concerns we face as a collective is the transition of warfare. In the future, the internet will be the platform upon which entities and governments wage war. This will continue to loom over us if the state continues to define for people what their data is and how it should be used.
And this is a recurring problem in many aspects of our lives. Decision making is centralized. Most of the time, we’re waiting for somebody else to tell us what to do as part of an overarching system.
“That's what's been happening. People have given up their freedom to external hopes and beliefs. And then they turn around, and then the outcome that they're promised, never happens. No matter who you are, whether you're Conservative, or Liberal, or Democrat, Republican, or Socialist Party, or Marxist Party, it doesn't matter,” Jason explained.
Unless we decide to come together and use the internet for fostering human understanding, we won’t be able to change our path.
Today, businesses are fundamentally supported by data. And in the future, it will only be supported by data. Unless you have the data to pre-empt your business decisions and stay ahead of the curve, you may not be able to keep up with these changes.
This doesn’t hold true for businesses alone. Our digital identities as individuals will soon become a pivotal part of our freedom and autonomy.
RELATED: Diving Into the Deep End With Financier and Author, Leo Tilman
TARTLE is free to use. The platform was made to empower individuals and help them secure their rights. This is their opportunity to achieve financial emancipation through the sharing of their data.
With high adoption rates and no barriers to entry, TARTLE is an opportunity for people to use a free technology that is capable of helping them gain financial stability. This is a symbol of hope, meant to help uplift the common man.
Let’s make TARTLE the largest distribution of wealth recorded in history.
How long have you been waiting for your life to begin? How much control have you given other entities over your future? How do modern economies benefit you?
We’ve created an economic system that judges the worth of entire societies based on their money. And for the longest time, we’ve confirmed that value. We continually accept this judgment and place our faith in it.
But really, we’re all living in a shared fiction. The one percent we’re trusting to create a better world for humanity, composed of central bankers and larger regulators, is crippled with red tape, bureaucracy, and even corruption.
The fourth industrial revolution is a pivot towards intensive, data-driven measures. We’ll be moving from the physical world to the digital. The internet of things, the metaverse, Web 3.0—all these initiatives involve more data.
It’s important that we have the tools we need to position ourselves strategically as this change occurs. So let’s talk about how TARTLE helps individuals secure their economic privacy and economic liberty.
On TARTLE, you are capable of choosing between sharing your information and keeping it to yourself. Conversely, you can also fine-tune your data packets so that you only get the information you need for your business. No bloatware involved.
Both paths create value for you—even when you decide that you want to limit the data you’ll be giving, you create an environment of scarcity.
With economic liberty, TARTLE acknowledges that your data is your right. By extension, your decision to use it creates economic gain for yourself. You have the choice over how much financial gain and economic empowerment is possible, regardless of whether you are a buyer or a seller on the platform.
TARTLE safeguards your economic privacy and economic liberty by providing a place where you are in complete control of your information. You can trust that every transaction you make is fair on both ends.
Our current system calls for us to believe that other entities have your best interests at heart, so there’s no need for you to take any action. But there’s no proof that they do. And you’re giving up so much of your freedoms in exchange for their participation.
This must be a significant factor in why people love cryptocurrencies. Despite the steep learning curve and risk, you are the sole owner of your wallet and key. No-one else can take control of it, and nobody needs to ask for the bank’s permission to do anything.
We deserve a system that shows us an immediate outcome for our hard work. This is where TARTLE comes in.
We built this platform so humanity could determine the value of society by their work, and give individuals an opportunity to learn how to monetize their own information.
Let’s take back our information. On TARTLE, we are in control. Let’s learn to say this:
What I do is my business.
Sign up for TARTLE here.
Follow Alexander McCaig on Twitter and Linkedin.
We’ve always been told that knowledge is power. And it’s true. Information is what drives markets. Do you want to corner a specific market? You need information. Do you want to understand it? You still need information.
For far too long, the people who have had access to this information are the ones on Wall Street, or the ones who can afford ultra-fast internet and tech equipment. But with TARTLE, that’s about to change.
In this episode, Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby discuss data-grabbing, the battle over money, and how we are at the center of everything.
Regulation is not bad. In some instances, establishing oversight on markets has been what makes it more accessible for the people on the ground. This is because it protects market participants from malicious actors, especially those who are not familiar with the commodity or currency yet.
Emerging technologies are appealing because they are innovative, and it’s always exciting to think that we may be early adopters of the next big thing. But we have seen just how catastrophic an unregulated commodity or currency can become. It’s not just a matter of losing jobs and money. When the stakes are high, people lose their lives as well. We only need to look at the Wall Street Crash of 1929 to see this.
So when we look at bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, it’s not enough to find out how we can use these technologies. We need to ask ourselves what the right regulatory response is as well.
With the introduction of decentralized technologies, particularly in finance, the world has realized one thing: people want choice. Consent in the outcome of new markets.
This highlights the problem we face with fiat currency. Government-issued currency isn’t inherently bad. But printing lots of money is. And an elite, exclusive group of bankers controlling that entire system makes it worse.
Why don’t we get to decide how far we go in our participation, and how much we can get out of it? Why does it feel like someone else is taking advantage of our hard work?
These are questions that anyone is bound to have mulled over in their lifetime. For too long, we’ve had to adjust to the whims of another person or entity. This centralized model does not listen to us, or cater to our needs. It’s time we find a new system to work with.
On TARTLE, everybody can be a market participant and a part of the investment. The market is capable of naturally equalizing; everybody can be a part of the investment. Everybody has the same access and the same information on the platform. And of course, everybody is fairly compensated for their hard work.
It’s almost like the relationship between mining and the price of gold. It’s the effort put into extracting the ore and refining it that makes it so expensive. Bitcoin mining operates in a similar fashion. But with TARTLE, you don’t need to have lots of complex equipment or cash to become a data champion.
Nobody takes a cut from your efforts.
It’s time for you to find out: what’s your data worth?
Sign up for TARTLE through this link here.
Follow Alexander McCaig on Twitter and Linkedin.
Our present economic systems are not structured to benefit us. Instead, it’s been tweaked throughout the years to allow people to protect their wealth. So, what happens to vulnerable people from disenfranchised communities who were not born with a silver spoon?
These minorities find themselves struggling to amass the same opportunities for success as those on the top. They cannot build a long-term vision that can sustain their evolution because they can’t even sustain their basic needs for survival.
When life becomes a routine of securing the bare essentials on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis, people start losing their sense of self. Their personality and mental health suffers. When depression is one of the greatest mental health challenges faced by Americans today, you know that people are trapped in an economic system that does not have their quality of life in its best interests.
In his book, Robert Verkaik tries finding the answers to heavy-hitting questions like: has capitalism broken its contract with hard work? Do we need to start reevaluating it? And if we do, how do we make it fairer so that it distributes more wealth, more fairly—which was the whole point of what capitalism was in the first place?
But how can we blame all these grassroot problems on an overarching economic system? While it is possible for people to dismiss market crashes because the system can bounce back, these disasters aren’t a one-time deal for everyone. They have lasting effects on people who have invested their lives into working for businesses.
These crashes don’t just change the dollar value. They change people as well.
According to Robert Verkaik, we moved to a capitalist system because we wanted to free ourselves from aristocracies, which concentrated all the land and wealth into the hands of the very, very few. Between the 19th and the 20th century, this was an effective transition that led to booming economies. And during this time, wealth was distributed relatively fairly in comparison to what capitalism is doing to the spread of wealth today.
Our survival throughout the COVID-19 pandemic was, in large part, due to the hard work of front liners and essential workers who made it possible for us to stay indoors and practice social distancing measures. Robert Verkaik emphasizes that we need to prioritize providing support to these workers, who traditionally went unnoticed.
Alexander McCaig discussed how, in the United States, a growing lower middle class is on its way to challenge the massive wealth gap. To this, Robert Verkaik believes that a more progressive taxation could be beneficial.
Robert Verkaik explains that in the last economic crisis, major banks injected plenty of capital into the system to keep the economy afloat. However, this liquidity eventually routed into the assets of the already wealthy. This manifested in owning multiple houses, jets, super yachts, and diamond investments, to name a few. And the value of these assets have doubled in the last ten years.
This means that the wealthy have only benefited from economic catastrophes, while the rest of us struggle to keep our heads above the water. Robert Verkaik believes that this will hold true for the pandemic, in the same way that it held true for the credit crunch. Meanwhile, the middle income earners continue to tread water.
He emphasizes that it’s less about using taxes on the rich to pay the poor, and more about dealing with a large middle class who are also struggling in different ways.
Ultimately, Robert Verkaik suggests that any change in the economy must be done with the climate in mind. This is why he supports the New Green Deal. Building economies with jobs that are environmentally sustainable is the key to the future.
What does this look like? It’s about looking for new economies and industries that create and help sustain new energies, sources of fuel, and houses with sustainable heating. These avenues bring in many more jobs to people who will be displaced through the changing nature of work and artificial intelligence.
Through TARTLE, you have the opportunity to become a part of something great by selling your personal data to nonprofit organizations who champion these causes. Your efforts to self-empowerment can help power the movement towards a greener, fairer economy.
What’s your data worth?
The Austrian School
The social function of economic science consists precisely in developing sound economic theories and in exploding the fallacies of vicious reasoning. In the pursuit of this task the economist incurs the deadly enmity of all mountebanks and charlatans whose shortcuts to an early paradise he debunks.
That’s a pretty lofty view of economics and economists. As such it is far, far away from any view that most people have, especially of economists. Anyone who is even the slightest bit informed as to the track record of economists and their pronouncements will at best see them as something like a weatherman. In this view the economist tries to make honest predictions based on the available data but gets it wrong more often than not. At worst, people see the economist as exactly the kind of charlatan Mises decries in the above quote. Economics as a discipline has lost a lot of respect. In short, economics is in trouble.
A big part of the problem is that too many economists don’t actually start with data. Not that they don’t use data. What they do is start with a theory that they prefer and then find the data to support their theory, ignoring or explaining away everything else. And that is on a good day. On a bad day (which seems to happen more and more) the economist is just providing quasi-intellectual cover to justify the policies of whichever government or corporation that they are working for. You can definitely see this if you pay attention to politics. Each party has its favorite economists to trot out to justify what they are doing, or to attack what the other team is doing, regardless of what the policy is. I first noticed this when way back in the Clinton administration, there was a Democrat move to do away with the “marriage tax” and the Republicans opposed it. Once Bush was in office, the positions flipped. Not that I believe either party really cared about the tax. It was simply another political football.
This is also apparent in the varying attitudes towards deficit spending. Both parties love it when they are in charge. They just spend it on slightly different things. If you pay too much attention to it, you just might drive yourself bonkers.
Another issue is that modern economists are too focused on tinkering around with policy, hoping to manipulate the market to get the outcome they want. This leads to extremely shallow thinking as all they wind up doing is at best looking at surface data and then trying to manipulate that so it fits better with their vision. What they neglect is everything below the surface, everything that is actually driving the data they are responding to.
Let’s get back to economists and their theories for a minute. Economists are often professors, teaching others about economics and how they work. One might be inclined to ask, if they really know so much about economics, why aren’t they rich? Don’t they know how the systems work and how to make use of their knowledge to their own benefit? Perhaps it’s because there is more going on than their equations can account for.
That is one of the central aspects of Mises and his Austrian School of Economics, there is just too much data to actually absorb it all. With any economy there are any number of variables that simply cannot be accounted for. That’s why Mises considered the idea of central planning and that one can control the market to be absurd. It is simply impossible to plan without knowing all the variables. Things will just happen whether you know the cause or not. Not only that, Mises understood that many if not most of the variables are not directly related to money, which is why he advocated for economists studying the social sciences.
Instead, perhaps we should be more humble and realize we can’t know everything and instead, observe the data as it is without imposing theories on it. Then perhaps we can move towards Mises’ goal of understanding the world a little better.
What’s your economy worth? Sign up for the TARTLE Marketplace through this link here.
There are a lot of different threats to the global economy out there. Civil unrest, wars, natural disasters, disease, and probably a few other things. One of the top threats recently identified by the World Economic Forum is cybersecurity, or rather the lack of it. That makes sense. We don’t say we live in the digital age for nothing. The whole world runs off of data and the various electronic devices that process, store, generate, and transmit it. If that data is not properly secured, it poses a threat to the very people generating it. There are certain companies and countries that are so entwined with the global economy, a successful cyberattack could cause a ripple effect that would affect people around the world across a variety of industries. Just imagine the damage that could be done if data centers used by Tyson or Oscar Meyer, or Monsanto were attacked. These companies affect a lot of the world’s food. Not to mention the militaries of the United States or China. If the computer networks for either country’s military were taken down, chaos would probably ensue.
If someone really wanted to cause economic chaos, they’d go after the stock exchanges. Over 80% of trades made these days are done by bots. A successful cyberattack could destroy the NYSE before people even knew what was happening.
On the individual level, your data is constantly getting sent out into the ether. Every app you download involves you giving up some kind of data that could be manipulated by nefarious actors, either for very particular ends or because they just enjoy messing with people’s lives. Just think about the facial recognition software on our phones. A company develops it, puts it on their phones, uses data from scanning your face to refine the algorithm and then goes and sells that algorithm to a foreign country or a company so they can use the new and improved facial recognition for their own ends, whatever they may be.
Cybersecurity has also been made a much bigger issue thanks to COVID. Now, many people are working from home instead of going to the office. That means individuals are doing potentially sensitive work and sharing it through their home networks, which are very likely not as secure as what they had at work. The potential for industrial espionage is massive. Files once centralized at work are now vulnerable to exploitation from malware the kids might accidentally download on their tablet, or to potentially lax security on the part of whatever cloud services are being used.
Fortunately, for many people this is largely common sense. Lots of people now know at least at a surface level the kinds of dangers that exist online. Lots of people know about the dangers of malware, the need for a decent password (password is not a good password by the way) and even for a VPN to protect your IP address, making you much more difficult to track through the internet.
Many companies are fully aware of the dangers as well. If you want to really see someone serious about cybersecurity, take a look at the financial institutions. Their firewalls have firewalls.
There is something that both individuals and corporations can do to keep their data secure. They can sign up with TARTLE. In doing so, they can sync their social media and other accounts with us, funneling your data through our VPN so it doesn’t just go to any number of third parties. We secure it and protect it. That means our users get full control over their data and who to share it with and when, giving all your data an extra layer of protection in the process.
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
The next industrial revolution is upon us. Already we are experiencing a major shift in how and where we work. Just a couple of years ago, working from home was something that really only applied to a select few but now it is the norm in many areas. That means companies are moving out of their office buildings and into much smaller, and easier to maintain spaces.
Instead of work teams being limited to those in a cluster of cubicles all living a few miles from each other, people now work in teams that include members from all around the world. TARTLE is a great example of that. We are physically based in New Mexico, incorporated as a public benefit corporation in Delaware and work with people everywhere from Michigan to the Philippines. We are hardly the only company that is operating in this way, nearly everyone employs freelancers or firms on an as needed basis in order to save money overall. One of the most surprising things is that there are plenty of people eager for this kind of work.
What this portends is a major ongoing shift in the way we do business around the world. Desired skill sets are changing and with all of this is coming a different kind of economy, different enough to call it a new industrial revolution. As with the previous industrial revolutions, there is a need for people with vision to lead the way adapting and making the best use of this new business and economic environment.
These visionaries will need to have more than drive, more than the desire to be on top. They need to have a deep understanding of the nature of the new economy. Gone are the days when everything can be thought of as a standalone entity. Not only do they have to see each department of a company as part of a larger dynamic whole, they need to see that each company’s actions can have a large effect on the other. Thanks to the advances in technology we’ve experienced over the last forty years, it’s become incredibly apparent that businesses exist as part of an ecosystem. This has always been true, it’s just much easier to see now.
Speaking of technology, these visionaries will also have to recognize the importance of data in the new economy. Data is what drives everything these days, making the acquisition of it and analyzing it is the most important thing any company can do for itself. In order to survive the new revolution, much less come out on top, our visionaries will need to realize that they are a data acquisition and technology company as much as they are a doll manufacturer (for example).
Of course, not even the best of visionaries can hope to navigate all these waters on their own. They will need help along the way. Just as every athlete has a coach, every bodybuilder a trainer, every visionary will need someone to support them on their journey. TARTLE understands this as the Sherpa model. Like the Sherpas who help people reach the top of Everest, TARTLE is here to team with the visionary, to carry the load and make the journey easier. We don’t seek the glory, our goal is to help others reach their goals. Sherpas can reach the peak of Everest dozens of times in their careers, and we’d love to help many more companies reach the top of their game in the digital economy.
We can help you gather and analyze the data you need in an ethical way, a way that still treats data with respect, as the product and work of individuals with rights as well as thoughts and desires. We’ll help make you not just financially successful but a champion of the digital economy.
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
Even if you have never seen the movie Jerry Maguire, you’ve heard the phrase, “Show me the money!”. Naturally, everyone is worried about being able to make money. So it makes sense that many of our most commonly asked questions are centered around it – How does TARTLE actually make money? How much does a buyer need to spend to get the data he is looking for, and how on earth does that lead to money for the buyer?
Let’s tackle these in order. First, TARTLE does make money off every purchase of data. The way we do that is we get paid a certain percentage of the bid price, but added after the bid. So if a seller sees a bid for his data at $10, the seller actually gets $10. He gets every penny he thinks he’s going to get. The buyer then pays TARTLE an additional 5% of the purchase price. So in this case, the buyer spends $10.50. $10 goes to the seller and fifty cents goes to us.
So, how much do you as a buyer actually pay per unit of data? Well, that’s going to vary a lot depending on the kind of data being purchased. A medical record complete with identifiers, DNA, and personal habits might go for a $1000 per record. A Facebook profile that is largely public will go for something a lot closer to a dollar. It all depends. In general, prices will follow the going market value of given units of data.
What about something long term? Rather than a one-time purchase of data you are looking to do a more long-term study, tracking the information of several people over a period of weeks or months? There are some serious advantages to getting data in this way. Perhaps the biggest is that you can actually get to know the people behind the data a bit. You can really learn not just the choices people make but how those choices might change over time and why they might change.
As an example, say a regional orchestra runs a subscription service. People pay a certain amount of money to get access to concerts at a discounted rate. The orchestra would be interested in tracking how many people actually go to their shows, how many they go to, and even more important, they can learn what it was about those particular shows that drew people to them. That kind of in-depth study can help guide the orchestra’s show choices for the next season.
Okay, but how does that kind of study work from a pricing standpoint? Easy, just tell us how long you want to collect data for, at what frequency and from how many people and we’ll get it set up. It’s as easy as that. No, this isn’t a subscription model service. If all you want is a month, just pay for the month. If you want 19 months, you can do that too. Whatever it is that you need.
How do you the buyer make money from the data you buy with TARTLE? Well, that one is on you. If you are already making money with data now, TARTLE can help you make more by supplying you with higher quality, more personal source data. If, on the other hand, you just have servers full of data laying around that probably aren’t helping to make your organization any money, we can definitely help. Chances are that you have just a bunch of meaningless data that was skimmed from various interactions online. The problem with those is that they lack context. If there is one thing we are good at here, it is data with context.
If you are a buyer looking to get access to higher quality data that can actually help you get some of the answers and direction you are looking for, sign up at tartle.co. It’s free to sign up and we’ll work with you to help you understand our system so you can get the most bang for your buck and start actually putting data to work to build your organization.
What’s your data worth?
You have questions, we have answers. We spend a lot of time going over the different aspects of TARTLE and how our system works and how it could benefit people in many different areas. Yet, that doesn’t mean every question gets answered in detail. Since we are all about transparency, we decided it was high time we got to some important questions from the perspective of the buyer. This is going to be the first in a series answering some of the most common questions we get from buyers.
One of the biggest and most important of those questions is how long does it take to complete a transaction between buyer and seller?
The answer depends, if you are after data from a specific demographic that is already part of our system, then it won’t take long at all. If the needed data isn’t in our marketplace, then it will naturally take a little longer. Based on our experience, once we start targeting a group of people it takes about seven to fifteen days to bring them into the TARTLE world and about another two weeks to get them up to speed on the system and convinced of the ROI on sharing the specific data you are after. Naturally, once you have established that connection, then that data is available much quicker.
So why wait thirty days? There are a few reasons. One is that once the connection is made you are getting real-time data much faster. Another is that the data is of higher quality as it’s based on a direct connection between you and the seller. Finally, we aren’t trying to game you in any way. A lot of third-party data sellers are companies that get their data in ways that can be highly questionable, scraping from various online interactions and transactions. They also tend to embed trackers in that data, trackers that let them know every time you access and manipulate that data. We don’t do that. Instead, we treat you the way we treat the sellers. The data is first the sellers and once you purchase it, it’s yours. We only serve as a broker to facilitate the transaction. Once the transaction is done, we have nothing more to do with your data.
How about the bid cycle? How does that work? This gets back into how quickly a transaction can take place once people are part of the TARTLE marketplace. The first thing is that the sellers list their information as being for sale. Then let’s say you as the buyer find 10,000 users with data that you need and you put in a bid. The way that works is that you bid the price that you will pay each individual. The sellers then have 24 hours to respond. If only 80% of the sellers do so, you only get charged for 8000 units of data rather than the full 10,000. In short, you only pay for what you get. Once the transaction is agreed upon and money changes hands then the data is sent to you in a convenient downloadable package.
How easy is it to sign up as a buyer? Extremely easy. Just go to tartle.co, and sign up as a buyer. It’ll be the button that says “I’m a buyer”. We’ll create your account and then you are free to roam. You can take your time to see what kind of data is available and learn how the system works and you do it all for free. When you work with TARTLE, you only pay when you want data and you only pay for the data you actually want. There is no sign-up fee, no subscription service to make sure you’re feeding our coffers whether you are getting anything for it or not.
That’s what we are all about here. We want you to only pay for what you get and not just pay us for existing. And that’s what sets TARTLE apart, we treat our sellers and our buyers as real people deserving of respect.
What’s your data worth?
