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How to onboard 300,000 new users in one geographic location

But they could become masternode shareholders.

Why dont you sign contracts with these merchants saying that they will not spend all the dash they will receive, but some portion of it they will use it to become masternode shareholders?

That way the merchants will not exchange all their dash to FIAT....

You may ask me..What portion? Well.... this is where vote the numbers applies....

Ask @splawik21 or @moocowmoo for shares...

You want to encourage a free economy by restricting how merchants use the money? Shouldn't they buy shares in a masternode because they believe in Dash and want the extra returns?
 
You want to encourage a free economy by restricting how merchants use the money? Shouldn't they buy shares in a masternode because they believe in Dash and want the extra returns?
People are enslaved to Fiat money, by the power of guns and by violence. How can a free economy exists, how can it flourish, as long as this economy is based on FIAT money? Even coinmarketcap refers to FIAT, and the reason people want dash is because its value refers to FIAT money. People are not here because they believe in dash, they are here because of the fiat value of dash. And the same applies to the merchants of course.

Furthermore, there is neither free economy, nor enslaved economy. There are only percentages of freedom and slavery. Let us vote these percentages. Let us vote the numbers.

Finnaly, do you think that the dash masternode owners would like all the dash they donate to be exchanged to fiat or to other cryptos? Do you think they like this kind of "freedom"?
 
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I realy like the constructive discussions taking place in this thread. Overall I'm supportive of your idea and I look forward to see how the direct experience down there helps to clarify a lot of questions about the details. :D
 
People are enslaved to Fiat money, by the power of guns and by violence. How can a free economy exists, how can it flourish, as long as this economy is based on FIAT money?

By educating them of the merits of crypto. By giving them the freedom to choose for crypto and abandoning fiat. By injecting Dash into the local economy and reaching critical mass. By making Dash the best and most honest means of transacting. By incentivizing the merchants, sure.

But not by force, contracts or regulation please.
 
By educating them of the merits of crypto. By giving them the freedom to choose for crypto and abandoning fiat. By injecting Dash into the local economy and reaching critical mass. By making Dash the best and most honest means of transacting. By incentivizing the merchants, sure.

But not by force, contracts or regulation please.

What are the merits of a crypto, if it worths zero fiat money?
There are a lot of cryptos out there, that worth zero fiat money.
Why dont you go there and you stay here?
You like fiat money, thats why. And fiat money is based on force and violence.

Are you against contracts and regulation?
What is this 45% miners,45% masternodes, 10% budget?
Isnt it an imposed contract, and an imposed regulation?
You were not free to choose this regulation, it was imposed by force (the core team's force) to you.
But you are still here, arent you?

Stop talking theoretically. Stop flying in the sky.
Land on the earth, and vote the numbers!

 
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Staying on topic.. The problem with contracts etc is that it needs to be enforced, leading to overhead. Dash is not in the business of enforcing and so shouldn’t David. It is better to offer positive incentives and let the ecosystem grow organically.
 
Staying on topic.. The problem with contracts etc is that it needs to be enforced, leading to overhead. Dash is not in the business of enforcing and so shouldn’t David. It is better to offer positive incentives and let the ecosystem grow organically.

Dash masternode owners should give the funds. And they should also incentivize the merchants, by financing discounts (which will bring more customers to them).

But @DavidHay's job should be to contact (and enforce if neccessary) the merchants, by signing contracts with them that they should not exchange to fiat money all the dash they will receive. An alternative more kind way is all the funded discounts to their products to be paid in masternode shares.

Fiat money uses violence, and violence against violence is sometimes the remedy.
 
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The economic value of something is not 100$ if you are not allowed to exchange it for 100$. So your suggestion would devalue Dash ;)

Funding discounts is a positive incentive and is a much better suggestion.
 
Funding discounts for merchants creates an even greater economic intensive for them to sign up. I like it.

Telling merchants how to run their business and enforcing contracts seems complicated and difficult to enforce.

My idea was to get the money circulating in the economy and then let the merchants naturally adapt and provide support. Another option would be to set aside a budget ahead of time and pay the merchants to sign up. It could work, I'm not completely against it. My original objection was the funds could be put to better use in the class room.
 
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Yet 45000 people managed to subscribe to getfreedash without any education!
I dont think the classroom's main purpose should be the education purpose.
Its main purpose should be to implement a proof of individuality.


Of course Getfreedash is a huge success. I would like to use his platform to distribute the crypto currency if we can make some small changes and he is willing to work with me. It also on-boards the most technical users and gives money across the whole country without focusing in one geographic area.

Shout out to @Dashmaximalist for all his incredible work.
 
Hello David
I have to correct you. You have misquoted me David with your quote below. For the record: I do not think this project is a good use of funds and I think it will do more harm than good I also did not state anywhere that I agree with your project infact quite the opposite.

From my past posts in this forum you will see how I came to these conclusions. This is a misquote from David Hay and I object to being quoted as "agreeing" because I do not agree with this project.

To summarize DeepBlue and myself both agree it's possible to setup a class room in Cucuta, educate 300,000 and give them $4 each.

I recommend other people read my in-depth posts fully in this forum. These are my concerns:

1. The project is not sustainable and therefore lower value than sustainable DASH projects. The Venezuela refugees visiting Cucuta have no resources to sustain the project - unlike many other DASH Venezuela proposals that can sustain themselves e.g. DASH HELP VENEZUELA project can sustain itself after the initial investment and is therefore much better investment than this type of project.

2. There is no currency crisis in Cucuta, Colombia. This project is not on Venezuelan soil - Columbia does not have a currency crisis like Venezuela. This again is a huge negative for this project. So we would give DASH money in a different country that does not have a currency crisis and then expect that the town is going to convert to DASH because 300,000 people have been trained on it? That does not make sense. People are going to continue to use their own currency and just hold the DASH as an investment at best because they have no need to do exchanges with DASH. They have their own functional currency. The place to do any projects for DASH adoption are ON VENEZUELA SOIL where there IS a currency crisis.

3. The project is not well thought out and doubts I have raised have not been addressed logically. There are emotion based responses in this project under the banner of "we need to do something for these people". I agree we need to do something but we need to do something that is actually going to have some long term good. Not a one hit wonder. David Hay himself stated he did not claim the project would be sustainable.

Do you not think that a sustainable project that generate wealth continuously after the initially funding is better use of funds? This is not even a humanitarian project because there is not enough money that is going to lead to lasting change. Once the Venezuela starts to generate her own wealth then they will have the money to do humanitarian projects that have lasting effects.

4. This project is likely to do damage to other DASH projects because $2,000,000 of funding is a huge amount of money that can be used to create sustainable projects that will bring lasting value and much greater ROI for Venezuela. The DASH treasury fund has limited funds if this project goes through other projects will be excluded as has happened on the last funding cycle. We have to ensure projects of this size are going to have the intended affects.

5. Where is the tech support going to come from on this project? It has been shown on the DASH conferences that large numbers of people had tech support questions. These were dealt with by DASH HELP Venezuela team. The team did a survey and found that 92% of people attending the conferences had additional questions and issues. That is on a conference of only 800 people. You are looking at a project of 300,000 people. Without these tech support questions being answered the training is of limited value. If you expect DASH HELP Venezuela to move to Cucate on this job then you are then taking away that resource from Caracas that needs that project support there. So who is going to do the Tech support on 300,000 people?

6. This project is very likely exacerbate the problem in Cututa because it will act as an incentive to attract many more refugees to Cucuta region. The town is already in a desperate situation with too many refugees. Now we are providing a financial incentive for people to visit that region even more? This does not make any sense to me.

7. David Hay says there will be massive publicity generated - he quotes his own channel with so far 50K views on his videos on the Venezuela project. That is not massive publicity. Even if the world media gets on board with this what happens if the project falls flat - like I believe it is going to do based on the deductions stated above? What type of publicity is that going to have on the World media for DASH.

It is clear that people are reacting emotionally and not thinking logically on this project. The help is not even going to give help to these people over a sustained period of time.

Think about this for yourself you are hungry and you have your family and kids in Cucate - outside of your own country. You get your DASH what is the first thing you're going to do with it? You spend it on a meal for you family. Since it is Columbia and not Venezuela you will probably get one meal possibly two. Then no more DASH. Then what? So what are you going to do now? You know how to use DASH but you have no DASH. So what are you going to do ?

Where is the long term value in giving people a meal or two? Wouldn't you rather want to be able to give them meals every day of their lives by helping Venezuela generate its own sustainable revenue and wealth? This is very short term thinking. We need to think longer term to solve this issue. 2 meals is not going to make a difference in the long term.

This project is poorly thought out and is very likely to cause a more damage than good for the reasons stated above. I would have to say I am voting Definite NO on this project unless someone can actually addresses the concerns I've raised on this project.
 
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But @DavidHay's job should be to contact (and enforce if neccessary) the merchants, by signing contracts with them that they should not exchange to fiat money all the dash they will receive. An alternative more kind way is all the funded discounts to their products to be paid in masternode shares.

The idea of getting the airdropped Dash to circulate once to the merchants is on the table. Why don't we try and now think about how the Dash can circulate further once the merchants have it? By doing research ahead of time, we can find out not only what merchants the migrants are doing business with, we can find out what merchants the merchants are doing business with.

With this information, perhaps we incorporate something into the design of the system that keeps the Dash circulating. One thing Colombian businesspeople love is to avoid taxes. They have developed a lot of tricks for doing that. This could be a new one. If they could actually buy whole shipments of stock for their stores off the books (because the Colombian government is Orwellian in its controlling of who buys what - they even expect you to give your national ID number as a consumer when buying retail at malls), a lot of them would be quite pleased.

- Merchants are also consumers, so with wide merchant adoption, we've got our first step.
- Merchants deal with bigger merchants. So we just repeat what we did with the migrants and find out who the merchants buy from.
- Merchants are business-minded. We can bring them masternode investment opportunities. Maybe we can even get them to form their own masternode association: The Colombian Merchant Dash Masternode Association. You get the idea.

I'm sure we can come up with more ideas. This is a relatively simple exercise conceptually. You just find out where people are spending their money and you go and get those places to accept Dash too, ad infinitum. It's a lot of legwork and talking. There's a lot of skepticism, especially here. But I don't think we need to invent a new algorithm to figure it out.
 
I agree with DeepBlue's assessment of the situation; I would also vote no as it is currently conceived. Further, getfreedash has this covered as far as I'm concerned, at a very low cost and with good data.

However, I am interested in the possibilities awaiting in Medellin. There is a great opportunity to educate the tech-ready Colombians, as well as the relatively comfortable Venezuelans residing there. The Venezuelans in Medellin are no doubt remitting money back to Venezuela. If we can educate both sides of this equation, it will pump crypto into Venezuela in a way nothing else can.

Maybe we urge DashMaximalist to address Colombia next, *after gaining experience and achieving success in Venezuela*. Getfreedash is very cost-effective, and if we can get Colombia on Dash it will only strengthen it's use in Venezuela.
 
Deepblue and I are repeating ourselves without adding anything new to the conversation.

1. The project is not sustainable and therefore lower value than sustainable DASH projects.
What in crypto is sustainable? The valuations are based on future potential and growth. Dash Help Venezuela is sustainable at the moment because of Venezeula's huge inflation (which is also completely unsustainable)
https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/pre-proposal-dash-help-venezuela-customer-support-center.24750/
They have 10 staff many with degrees in engineering getting paid on average $400 per month.

Run this same office in another country like the US and watch the costs sky rocket.

My family still living in Venezuela expects things are going to get worse. The next set of elections will be rigged like the last, oil production will continue to fall and at the moment 57% of people living in the country want to leave. Deepblue how is this sustainable?

2. There is no currency crisis in Cucuta, Colombia. This project is not on Venezuelan soil - Columbia does not have a currency crisis like Venezuela.

Things are much better in Colombia but still not perfect
http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=COP&view=5Y

The purchasing power of the US dollar vs Colombian peso has increase 80% over the last 5 years. That's an average of 16% per year.

Venezuelan citizens have been robbed by their government and are moving to a new country. That is a very compelling reasons to use crypto over fiat.

3. The project is not well thought out and doubts I have raised have not been addressed logically.

This idea is two weeks old. This is a pre-proposal, we are developing our business plan, talking to potential partners and accessing the situation on the ground. The videos I've made in the last two weeks have over 50,000 views there's a team of volunteers working on discord https://discord.gg/SrZmpPM

4. This project is likely to do damage to other DASH projects

Yes you bring up a valid point here. Dash is a democracy, I'll reach out to the community members and see if they feel the same way.

5. Where is the tech support going to come from on this project?

Our classroom, we will have a physical office in Cucuta with staff and volunteers.

First you claim these people are going to immediately spend all their Dash and never use it again. Now you bring up tech support and say our office in Colombia will strain the resources in Venezuela? I want to make sure I understand this correctly. Someone visits our office in Cucuta, takes a class, talks to the volunteers there and when they have a problem instead of going to the office they find without any help from us the number for the help desk in Venezuela and start flooding it.

6. This project is very likely exacerbate the problem in Cututa because it will act as an incentive to attract many more refugees to Cucuta region.
Ok so injecting money into a struggling economy will only make things worse.

7. David Hay says there will be massive publicity generated - he quotes his own channel with so far 50K views on his videos on the Venezuela project.

Deepblue stated in a previous post he has 3 university degrees BSc Hons, MSc (Masters) and a Ph.D , 25 years worth of business experience and built websites with over 100,000,000 unique visitors. He should be doing the marketing for Dash not me.

He mocks the 50k views I have generated in the last 2 weeks. If I can generate these results in two weeks with no budget this is obviously going to grow into something much larger.

I don't understand how he can be so critical when Dash has such a small presence on youtube. Amanada Johnson makes great content but her best video got 77k views and most get under 10k.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAzD2v9Yx4a4iS2_-unODkA/videos

I'm not here to beg the dash community for money. I'm developing a business plan, building a team of volunteers and creating a blue print for how to on-board people in one geographic area so crypto can reach a tipping point.

If people share my vision I'm happy to work with them. If they don't we'll have to agree to disagree.















Hello David
I have to correct you. You have misquoted me David with your quote below. For the record: I do not think this project is a good use of funds and I think it will do more harm than good I also did not state anywhere that I agree with your project infact quite the opposite.

From my past posts in this forum you will see how I came to these conclusions. This is a misquote from David Hay and I object to being quoted as "agreeing" because I do not agree with this project.



I recommend other people read my in-depth posts fully in this forum. These are my concerns:

1. The project is not sustainable and therefore lower value than sustainable DASH projects. The Venezuela refugees visiting Cucuta have no resources to sustain the project - unlike many other DASH Venezuela proposals that can sustain themselves e.g. DASH HELP VENEZUELA project can sustain itself after the initial investment and is therefore much better investment than this type of project.

2. There is no currency crisis in Cucuta, Colombia. This project is not on Venezuelan soil - Columbia does not have a currency crisis like Venezuela. This again is a huge negative for this project. So we would give DASH money in a different country that does not have a currency crisis and then expect that the town is going to convert to DASH because 300,000 people have been trained on it? That does not make sense. People are going to continue to use their own currency and just hold the DASH as an investment at best because they have no need to do exchanges with DASH. They have their own functional currency. The place to do any projects for DASH adoption are ON VENEZUELA SOIL where there IS a currency crisis.

3. The project is not well thought out and doubts I have raised have not been addressed logically. There are emotion based responses in this project under the banner of "we need to do something for these people". I agree we need to do something but we need to do something that is actually going to have some long term good. Not a one hit wonder. David Hay himself stated he did not claim the project would be sustainable.

Do you not think that a sustainable project that generate wealth continuously after the initially funding is better use of funds? This is not even a humanitarian project because there is not enough money that is going to lead to lasting change. Once the Venezuela starts to generate her own wealth then they will have the money to do humanitarian projects that have lasting effects.

4. This project is likely to do damage to other DASH projects because $2,000,000 of funding is a huge amount of money that can be used to create sustainable projects that will bring lasting value and much greater ROI for Venezuela. The DASH treasury fund has limited funds if this project goes through other projects will be excluded as has happened on the last funding cycle. We have to ensure projects of this size are going to have the intended affects.

5. Where is the tech support going to come from on this project? It has been shown on the DASH conferences that large numbers of people had tech support questions. These were dealt with by DASH HELP Venezuela team. The team did a survey and found that 92% of people attending the conferences had additional questions and issues. That is on a conference of only 800 people. You are looking at a project of 300,000 people. Without these tech support questions being answered the training is of limited value. If you expect DASH HELP Venezuela to move to Cucate on this job then you are then taking away that resource from Caracas that needs that project support there. So who is going to do the Tech support on 300,000 people?

6. This project is very likely exacerbate the problem in Cututa because it will act as an incentive to attract many more refugees to Cucuta region. The town is already in a desperate situation with too many refugees. Now we are providing a financial incentive for people to visit that region even more? This does not make any sense to me.

7. David Hay says there will be massive publicity generated - he quotes his own channel with so far 50K views on his videos on the Venezuela project. That is not massive publicity. Even if the world media gets on board with this what happens if the project falls flat - like I believe it is going to do based on the deductions stated above? What type of publicity is that going to have on the World media for DASH.

It is clear that people are reacting emotionally and not thinking logically on this project. The help is not even going to give help to these people over a sustained period of time.

Think about this for yourself you are hungry and you have your family and kids in Cucate - outside of your own country. You get your DASH what is the first thing you're going to do with it? You spend it on a meal for you family. Since it is Columbia and not Venezuela you will probably get one meal possibly two. Then no more DASH. Then what? So what are you going to do now? You know how to use DASH but you have no DASH. So what are you going to do ?

Where is the long term value in giving people a meal or two? Wouldn't you rather want to be able to give them meals every day of their lives by helping Venezuela generate its own sustainable revenue and wealth? This is very short term thinking. We need to think longer term to solve this issue. 2 meals is not going to make a difference in the long term.

This project is poorly thought out and is very likely to cause a more damage than good for the reasons stated above. I would have to say I am voting Definite NO on this project unless someone can actually addresses the concerns I've raised on this project.
 
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Hello David
I again need to correct you because you have stating something about me that is again not correct.

He mocks the 50k views I have generated in the last 2 weeks.

I am most definitely not "mocking" you David. I am stating facts. How is that mocking you? If it came across as mocking then I´m genuinely sorry you´ve chosen to take it that way. The fact is your Venezuela based videos, which is what we are discussing have 50K views. I want to make sure that people assessing this project fully understand it is not 6.5 million views on Venezuela. The 6.5 million views is for all your videos on your entire channel with many different subjects.

I quoted my experience because you stated I was only giving just "opinions" and "none" of what I said was based on facts.

I disagreed with your point of view and I had to quote my experience in order to validate that statement. I´m not stating that to impress anyone. I´m stating it to impress upon you that I know what I am talking about. There is a big difference between the two.

You have also misquoted me several times which I have raised objections to. This is to ensure people do not misunderstand what I have stated.

I have openly stated I can see you have good intentions and your heart is in the right place.

Please do not take offense at my feedback. I hope you will look at my feedback as constructive criticism, and I sincerely apologize if I have inadvertently caused you any upset. I assure you that was not my intention. I just want us to get to the truth about this project so that people can fairly assess it.

DeepBlue
 
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I am happy to increase to $6 per person, this might sounds like alot now, but if adoption actually takes hold, this will be a drop in the ocean compared to what Dash's monthly budget will be. We need to take risks and at the end of the day, this is only helping people who clearly need it more than us!

With escrow @greencandle_jeremy @Green Candle can you facilitate escrow for this as its a large project? If not then Dash Core / Instant Karma fund could do it.

@DavidHay - with escrow its important you break the milestones up into manageable chunks with estimated funds required per milestone. The proposal will need to be multi-month proposal to reduce the burden and let other projects be funded each month. If your project will take 6 months in length then you could raise a 5 month payout proposal with the same payout each month. So if its 2.6M all up then ~520k per month for 5 months is paid into escrow. As you complete the milestones the next batch of funds is released to you etc....Key is ensuring you communicate regularly and provide updates to the community/escrow to ensure a) the Masternodes dont downvote and cut funding due to lack of performance and b) escrow keeps you well funded.

I am sure the escrow provider can give you all the details you need. As this is a large project I would suggest trying to finalize business plans and put a final proposal into the network asap. Masternodes will need more than 1-1.5 weeks for a project this large to further discuss and vote.

@DavidHay Green Candle would be happy to help with your project, please contact us at [email protected] at your convenience.
 
The idea of getting the airdropped Dash to circulate once to the merchants is on the table. Why don't we try and now think about how the Dash can circulate further once the merchants have it? By doing research ahead of time, we can find out not only what merchants the migrants are doing business with, we can find out what merchants the merchants are doing business with.

With this information, perhaps we incorporate something into the design of the system that keeps the Dash circulating. One thing Colombian businesspeople love is to avoid taxes. They have developed a lot of tricks for doing that. This could be a new one. If they could actually buy whole shipments of stock for their stores off the books (because the Colombian government is Orwellian in its controlling of who buys what - they even expect you to give your national ID number as a consumer when buying retail at malls), a lot of them would be quite pleased.

- Merchants are also consumers, so with wide merchant adoption, we've got our first step.
- Merchants deal with bigger merchants. So we just repeat what we did with the migrants and find out who the merchants buy from.
- Merchants are business-minded. We can bring them masternode investment opportunities. Maybe we can even get them to form their own masternode association: The Colombian Merchant Dash Masternode Association. You get the idea.

I'm sure we can come up with more ideas. This is a relatively simple exercise conceptually. You just find out where people are spending their money and you go and get those places to accept Dash too, ad infinitum. It's a lot of legwork and talking. There's a lot of skepticism, especially here. But I don't think we need to invent a new algorithm to figure it out.

Additionaly, another buisness plan could be to build a brand new cryptocurrency network for the venezuela merchants, totally independent from dash or any other already established cryptocurrency, where each merchant will become a masternode owner.

I am a proponent of this solution, because this solution is based on pure faith and it is totally independent from fiat money (independant also from any crypto that depends on fiat money and refers to fiat money).

But who is capable to inspire that kind faith to the people of venezuela? You need a new satoshi there.

 
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Maybe we urge DashMaximalist to address Colombia next, *after gaining experience and achieving success in Venezuela*. Getfreedash is very cost-effective, and if we can get Colombia on Dash it will only strengthen it's use in Venezuela.

No offense intended but I just question the utility of distributing 50 cents via SMS confirmations. Two concerns come to mind:

- I'm not sure what anyone is going to do with 50 cents other than to verify that Dash works as promised, i.e. as a novelty. That is valuable, but what's the next step?
- In the developing world it is very believable that someone is going to get paid off who can intercept SMS verifications to thousands of phone numbers at the cell phone company and rip the Dash distribution system off, potentially in a massive way. If there are manual controls in place to prevent that, that suggests that this is not a sustainable system for airdrops, i.e. it has low throughput.

David has a solid idea here. Does his plan produce more questions than answers? Oh, yes! Should it be framed as a small trial of maybe USD$50,000 first? Of course! Should this plan have been presented as a pre-proposal? No way! I told him so myself privately before he posted it. There is so much more development that needs to be done first. IMHO, jumping the gun has actually set things back.

But his idea actually includes a level of verification that is stronger than getfreedash's, as awesome as getfreedash is. Take that for what it's worth.

David's idea is going to happen one way or another. It is simply too seductive, and we can not wait around for mass adoption to come to us. That's just not how it works.

I am really thrilled to have discovered the details behind Dash. I've been active in the libertarian anarchist community since 2008. People mentioned Dash to me but I always came away with the impression that it was generic digital cash. Sorry, that is the branding and the impression I came away with. You can tell me that I should have looked more closely and done more research, but the responsibility of clear communication falls with us, if we want Dash to benefit from wider adoption. Which I do. I am really excited about Dash now.

I see a lot of conservatism in these comments. I like that but I also encourage folks to be open to new ideas and willing to try new things. Saying no is the easiest answer.
 
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