We don't want to gate any core content behind the BDG Token. A very little amount of people are into crypto and not allowing them to participate on the website would significantly hurt the business and our user count. At the start, we want to use the BitDegree Token as an enhance mechanic. Meaning students that use BDG get a more complete experience and features that build up their profile that they can later present to potential employers. However, if you're just looking to buy 1 course and never come back we do accept FIAT payments. If we wouldn't do this, people would turn to competitors.

In short, having FIAT payments mean we have a chance to convert that student into BDG user later. If we don't accept FIAT we lose that student altogether.

For development and team updates, I recommend you have a look at our blog. It's https://blog.bitdegree.org/. You'll be able to find all of the latest news surrounding the project. In short, development is going great! We're increasing our user base, new features get rolled out monthly, we're now starting to adopt the token in more ways on the platform.

We do not control the market and we do not intend to. To respect everyone who participated in the BitDegree ICO we're working on the product that we've outlined in our whitepaper. We want to be very clear and we will not participate in any market manipulation or create fake volume. Because we respect everyone that contributed to the project! That's why we're so transparent and focus on the legal side of crypto. Even Bitcoin is now under $4k dollars and experiencing huge losses, every single cryptocurrency has been affected this past year and exchanges do not help the situation.

The reality is that projects that get bullied into spending millions of dollars (that contributors gave for project development) on exchange listings and later spend a monthly fee on trading bots and market manipulation. This ends up hurting everyone in the long run. Because this is money that they don't spend on self-sustainment or project developing and once they are out of money, they are forced to stop their projects.

BitDegree isn't here for the short-term, we've built sustainable businesses before and we know what it takes. That's why instead of a show of smoke and mirrors and wasteful spending, we focus on what matters the most - THE PROJECT, THE USERBASE, SUSTAINABILITY, and ADOPTION.

But people are unsatisfied with their educational experience or cannot afford it all together. We're not looking to completely replace other educational institutions. Our goal is the co-creation of value where teachers/students and employers would get the most bang for their buck.

With gamification, scholarships, and job-matching all in one, we're offering something that hasn't been done yet. In just half a year we've managed to gain a userbase of ~80thousand students. And we've just begun.

I would disagree with you on this point. We can't do what we've set out to do without blockchain, a quick explanation.

1. Scholarships & Micro-payments ( using smart-contracts we can easily distribute payments and scholarships to students). Imagine convincing thousands of people to put in their banking information and then manually sending them a couple of dollars as an incentive for completed achievements. This would be such a huge timesink that blockchain and token payments solve with 1 smart-contract.


2. 100% revenue share model for teachers. Using blockchain we can have it so students pay teachers directly. Smart-contract would outline the transaction details so that no side would have to "pay first" and feel uneasy.

3. Safety for students. If businesses sponsor courses, students can rest assured that they'll get their scholarships because everything is processed through smart-contracts. Blockchain also adds a level of transparency so no-one feels cheated.

4. And tokens allow us to gamify the platform.

His opinions are his own, we never did any sponsored content or paid promotions. BitDegree is an educational platform that utilizes cryptocurrency, it's two of his main things so there's no reason for him to not like the project

We're happy to have part of his community onboard and Suppoman even visited the BitDegree offices when he was in town for Blockchain.eu (a blockchain conference organized in part with BitDegree).

Hey, most of the courses already store progress on your profile, not the device. So, you'll be able to continue your course no matter which device you use. The only courses that do not behave like this are some of our earliest interactive courses (at the moment of release, user profiles didn't exist yet). We'll be upgrading those courses soon, but they're not the highest priority at the moment.

Speaking about proper help and support, we've already implemented a live chat feature for teachers. They can contact team members from their dashboard at any time. We'll be implementing this feature for paid students as well, just a bit later. For now, you can always contact us via email hello@bitdegree.org. Or private messages on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on. 

We've released our Monthly Roundup video for July. The co-founder of BitDegree talks about Student, Instructor & Cryptocurrency community-related news. You can watch the video on our YouTube Channel or a more detailed overview available on our Medium Channel.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGN4sesqFbs
2. https://blog.bitdegree.org/monthly-roundup-6-token-scholarships-fiat-gateway-plans-for-the-future-1518b0225319

Well, this is one of the possible options. A bit of an inconvenience for teachers/students as they would have to pay more for conversion fees. We're still exploring a scenario where it would be the most beneficial for everyone. However, an internal converter is being discussed

Yeah, that's the general issue we're running into now. To mass adopt a new technology it has to be significantly better than existing solutions. The blockchain technology isn't there yet and it's not a BitDegree specific problem. But we want to be part of the solution and work on a way for users to use any payment method available that would later get converted through exchanges. This method has it's own issues and isn't perfect but it would be a start.

We are legally compliant. And we operate in the European Union, under the laws of EU Central bank.

A while ago BitDegree has partnered with ORCA Alliance. Since then, their team has worked on creating the most user-friendly personal finance management app, which also embraces crypto. Now, they are ready to go public and we are happy to announce the benefits of our partnership.

Firstly, the ORCA Alliance will use BitDegree as their platform of choice for their online education needs. A series of courses on personal finance management, including crypto, will be created by them and hosted at BitDegree.

Secondly, as ORCA Alliance is conducting its ICO from the 6th of August till the 6th of September, the BitDegree community can enjoy an additional 5% bonus with the following referral code: JJNA6B

Show some support for ORCA and we're looking forward to incredible courses on financing  https://orcaalliance.eu/

Thanks

For those who are looking for the best ways to stay up-to-date with everything that's BitDegree related I recommend you follow us on the BitDegree Medium Blog

Just the latest recap of articles that might be of interest.

1. How do Additional Payment Methods Affect the BDG Token

2. First Token Scholarships Have Been Issued

3. A B2B Advisor Joins the BitDegree Team

4. BitDegree - The Winner of EdTechX Startup Super League

Yes, the payments are associated with user profiles. That's how we know which course to unlock for which user. The user profiles are storing information about completed/in-progress courses but these values are not yet stored on blockchain as the platform is still in beta.

Yes, you would be able to pay from exchange wallets. But I would recommend using your personal wallet. If something goes wrong we could retrace the transaction better.

Hey, there's currently a barrier between audiences. If we market to the cryptocurrency crowd who knows how to use BDG tokens, there would be close to no users because the crypto community is extremely small. And, if we market to the 99.5% of the remaining populations (as we're doing now) they have troubles purchasing and want a FIAT gateway. To solve this, we're meeting both of the communities half-way, accepting other payment methods, but we'll be heavily incentivizing the usage of BDG token in the upcoming months. So, it's beneficial for people to learn more about crypto and use it as a payment method. Another solution that's being explored is an automatic internal converter. So, it users could pay as they see most convenient and we would convert everything to BDG.

You can read more about it BitDegree Tokenomics & Payment Models. Introducing ETH/BTC & FIAT Payments in The Future!

Hey, some of the tokens are locked so CMC doesn't take them into consideration. For full details, you can check out the white paper.

Token Distribution
• BitDegree foundation: 66 million (locked for 360 days);
• Scholarships pool: 165 million;
• Token available to the public at launch: 336,6 million;
• Team: 66 million (locked for 720 days);
• Advisors / Partners: 13,2 million (locked for 160 days);
• Bounties : 13,2 million;
• Tokens in total: 660 million.

We address blockchain in education on our blog in a 3 part article.

Part 1: https://blog.bitdegree.org/blockchain-in-education-p1-fud-c8e6950d82c1
Part 2: https://blog.bitdegree.org/blockchain-in-education-p2-why-bitdegree-needs-blockchain-2c78b2587820
Part 3: https://blog.bitdegree.org/blockchain-in-education-p3-how-bitdegree-will-use-blockchain-f5fe3c19ab1f

If you still have questions after this, we can discuss it. Message us on Facebook, Twitter, Telegram.