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Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure

By John Ward / March 20, 2015 / 65 Comments
This is the history of my experience trying to make money online over the past 10 years or so. This is by far the longest post I've ever personally written and it's more of an autobiography than a blog post....
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I Made an Automated Pancakeswap Prediction Bot

By John Ward / October 14, 2022 / 0 Comments
A few weeks ago I got the idea to try to automatically bid on Pancakeswap's Prediction game. So I decided to try to build a Pancakeswap Prediction bot to take on the task. I did this just to learn about...
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IBM Watson Explorer

By John Ward / April 6, 2015 / 1 Comment
I'm going to talk a little bit about IBM Watson Explorer (WEX). A few people have contacted me about what I do at my day job as a Watson Explorer Consultant. Since this is my personal site I don't usually...
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What is IBM Watson

By John Ward / July 24, 2020 / 0 Comments
There is a lot of confusion about what exactly IBM Watson is? I'm going to try to clear that up a little bit in this blog post. I'll go into the history of IBM Watson and what IBM is doing...
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My 2022 Recap and 2023 Plans

By John Ward / January 13, 2023 / 0 Comments
I haven't been posting to my blog that often, but I wanted to recap 2022 and lay out some of my plans for 2023. Overall, 2022 was a pretty good year for me, and I made some progress on business...
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Watson Explorer vs Elasticsearch for Enterprise Search

By John Ward / May 12, 2020 / 0 Comments
Are you interested in IBM Watson Explorer vs Elasticsearch? Recently, I had to do some comparisons between IBM Watson Explorer and Elasticsearch for a project. I spent some time going through the features of both platforms and found some interesting...

One AdSense Change Dramatically Increased My Earnings…

By John Ward / March 9, 2015 / 12 Comments
... and I have no idea what it is. I used to blog actively on my tutorial site, TeamTutorials. In it's prime the site would see over 100k page views per month. Even in the prime the site barely met...

Are Products the Road to Prosperity?

By John Ward / May 13, 2015 / 1 Comment
A few weeks ago a wrote a somewhat popular post about my past experiences trying to make money online. I went through the ups and downs of working as an affiliate promoting other people's products. At the conclusion of the...

Regular Expression Converter for Watson Explorer Engine

By John Ward / August 23, 2019 / 0 Comments
Sometimes it's useful to extract data from a Watson Explorer content node using regular expressions. In this post, I'll show you how to extract data using a regular expression and create a new content node for that specific data. To...
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IBM Watson Discovery Fundamentals Training

By John Ward / October 28, 2020 / 0 Comments
I'm excited to announce that I've released my first course on Udemy titled IBM Watson Discovery Fundamentals. This course is designed to give business and technical users a good high-level overview of the IBM Watson Discovery service. What is IBM...
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Cryptocurrency – A New Direction

I think I’m going to be taking a different direction with my blog with more of a focus on cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. I looked back and I have a very long time span between posts and each time I post, I make a comment about reviving this site. I can’t promise that I will stay committed this time, but I’ve had an interest in the crypto market for almost a decade now and think that might be fun to write about. Honestly, the idea is self-serving because it causes me to do more research into the market and then, hopefully, make better investment decisions.

My History with Cryptocurrency

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As I said above, I’ve been interested in crypto since about 10 years ago. I believe the whitepaper on how bitcoin would work was published on January 3rd, 2009. A co-worker had initially introduced me to the concept of bitcoin and I found it interesting, but I didn’t really understand the concept and the impact that it would eventually have. It seemed too difficult to purchase at the time and people were simply attempting to spend them on pizzas and whatnot. Not to mention that it became a popular currency for the underground drug market on the dark web. To be honest it seemed like some kind of nerd thing that would be cool to a minority of people but never really gain traction. I never really thought of it as a digital store of value like gold or something for finance transactions.

I didn’t actually buy my first crypto, which was bitcoin, until around 2015 at the behest of my wife. We decided to invest some money in both bitcoin and Tesla stock which both turned out to be decent decisions. At some point, I did mine some satoshis that are lost in a wallet somewhere.

My Intentions in Writing About Cryptocurrency

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I do want to put it out there now that I’m not some crypto multi-millionaire who really foresaw the future of finance and went all-in on bitcoin early. Although, I do hold a significant amount (to my financial situation) in a bunch of different cryptocurrency tokens. My intention here is not to become some “crypto guru” that is trying to sell you a course on trading. I just want to share some of my experience and hopefully help a few people who are sitting on the sidelines get into this market before it really becomes mainstream. Plus, as I said, it causes me to do my homework before writing about this stuff publicly.

From time to time I may discuss products like exchanges or services that do provide me a kickback for promoting them. However, I will ensure that it’s actually a service I would use and can recommend to you without losing some sleep at night.

I plan to have some good content for beginners who are looking to get into trading or holding cryptocurrencies but just don’t fully understand it or don’t know how to do it. I personally believe everyone should hold some amount of cryptocurrencies as an investment. I recently got my mom and dad set up with a good beginner portfolio that I think has a lot of potentials.

Some of the deeper dives into the technology behind some of the coins, tokens, networks, and decentralized finance apps will probably even be relevant to seasoned cryptocurrency traders (or at least they can tell me that I’m full of shit in the comments). I read and consume a lot of content, and my goal is to translate a lot of that into a language that cryptocurrency newbies can understand.

How You Can Get Started with Crypto

So, if you have any interest in the world of crypto and you want to get in before it becomes mainstream, the best thing you can do is sign up for my mailing list below. I promise I won’t sell your information to 3rd parties and I’ll only send you to update that I think are relevant and that you will like.

As a quick note, one of the easiest ways to get started buying cryptocurrency is to create an account on Coinbase. I’ll go deeper into exchanges in a future post. 

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John Ward

I've been in working in the tech space since about 2004. I've spent time working with Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Advertising technology.