Bitcoin and The Millions

After all the ups and downs Bitcoin (btc) is proving that investing in digital currencies isn’t for the faint of heart. Lately and based in Budapest I see all the recent developments of btc, just 4 years ago I managed to secure some healthy  positions  when it was worth about 24€ per btc then mid July 2017 it went up to 2500€ per btc and during the last two months it went up to over 7000€ per btc. 

After plunging as much as 29 percent from a record high following the cancellation of a technology upgrade on Nov. 8, the largest cryptocurrency came roaring back in early trading Monday before fluctuating between gains and losses.

“Crypto trading is not for the novice investor,” said John Spallanzani, chief macro strategist at GFI Securities LLC in New York.

While multiple reasons are being cited for the price volatility, one of the more viable is that some investors are switching to alternative coins. Bitcoin cash, an offshoot of bitcoin that includes many of the technical upgrades being debated by developers, has more than doubled in the same period, however I wouldn't suggest changing to other cryptocurrency alternatives since the only one I endorse and support is Bitcoin.

“We have seen similar steep falls in bitcoin throughout the year -- specifically in June and September -- but every time a considerable decline occurs, new investors jump in to experience the new asset class,” Hussein Sayed, chief market strategist at ForexTime Ltd., a currency broker that uses the brand FXTM, wrote in a note Monday.

While markets had been focusing on bitcoin’s more than 500 percent surge this year, bitcoin cash was gaining popularity because of its larger block size. That’s a characteristic that makes transactions cheaper and faster than the original but I don't believe it could take over not yet.

When a faction of the cryptocurrency community canceled plans to increase bitcoin’s block size on Wednesday -- a move that would have created another offshoot -- some supporters of bigger blocks rallied around bitcoin cash.

The resulting volatility has been extreme even by bitcoin’s wild standards and comes amid growing interest in cryptocurrencies among regulators, banks and fund managers. While skeptics have called its rapid advance a bubble, the asset has become too big for many on Wall Street to ignore. Even after shrinking as much as $38 billion since Nov. 8, bitcoin boasts a market value of about $110 billion.

Supporters of bitcoin’s technology upgrade “are now switching support to bitcoin cash,” said Mike Kayamori, head of Tokyo-based Quoine, the world’s second most-active bitcoin exchange over the past day. “There’s a panic about what’s happening. People shouldn’t panic. Just hold on to both coins until we see how it plays out.”

The cancellation of last week’s bitcoin upgrade has left users to choose between the two versions of the cryptocurrency. On one side is the original bitcoin, powered by so-called SegWit technology, which aims to improve its performance by moving unessential data off of its underlying blockchain which eventually will have to evolve to be able to improve the blockchain. On the other we have bitcoin cash which we don't know too much about it.

Proponents of bitcoin cash believe their approach is simpler and closer to the original goal of bitcoin, which was described primarily as a payment system in its white paper. Supporters of the original bitcoin say that vision is too limited, and that by improving the blockchain with SegWit technology, bitcoin can become a new digital-asset class that not only supports payments but countless other functions.

Upgrade Called Off

While bitcoin cash has been around for months, it saw limited support as the community awaited last week’s technology upgrade for the original bitcoin, which promised similar features. Now that the upgrade has been called off, businesses that use the cryptocurrency primarily as a payment method are expected to increase adoption of bitcoin cash.

While bitcoin cash surged over the weekend, it hasn’t been a straight line up. The cryptocurrency was trading at $1,300 at 4:45 p.m. in New York, down from a high of about $2,478 on Sunday, Coinmarketcap.com prices show.

Bitcoin has been similarly volatile; it initially rose after news that it would avoid another split, but the gains were short-lived. Its plunge earlier Monday to as low as $5,605 compares with an intraday record $7,882 on Nov. 8.

I believe Bitcoin will still dominate the world of cryptocurrency and if you are hesitant to buy it, then you could also opt for the alternative of Investing in the stock market with The Bitcoin Group SE  a holding company focused on innovative and disruptive business models and technologies from the field of cryptocurrency and blockchain. 

The Bitcoin Group SE holds 100% of the shares of the Bitcoin Deutschland AG that operates the only German authorised trading platform for the digital currency bitcoin under the domain Bitcoin.de. and it is currently trading at a discounted price of 76€ per share. So there you have it, either buying bitcoins or Investing on them might be a move that should be made and for now let's just forget about bitcoin cash.

Meanwhile I don't want to hear about any other ICO's not even Bitcoin for a while so secure positions and see you with the Millions.

The Physicist, The Bikini Model and The Millions

In November 2011, Paul Frampton, a theoretical particle physicist, met Denise Milani, a Czech bikini model, on the online dating site Mate1.com. She was gorgeous — dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a supposedly natural DDD breast size. In some photos, she looked tauntingly steamy; in others, she offered a warm smile. Soon, Frampton and Milani were chatting online nearly every day. Frampton would return home from campus — he’d been a professor in the physics and astronomy department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 30 years — and his computer would buzz. “Are you there, honey?” They’d chat on Yahoo Messenger for a while, and then he’d go into the other room to take care of something. A half-hour later, there was the familiar buzz. It was always Milani. “What are you doing now?”

Frampton had been very lonely since his divorce three years earlier; now it seemed those days were over. Milani told him she was longing to change her life. She was tired, she said, of being a “glamour model,” of posing in her bikini on the beach while men ogled her. She wanted to settle down, have children. But she worried what he thought of her. “Do you think you could ever be proud of someone like me?” Of course he could, he assured her.

Frampton tried to get Milani to talk on the phone, but she always demurred. When she finally agreed to meet him in person, she asked him to come to La Paz, Bolivia, where she was doing a photo shoot. On Jan. 7, 2012, Frampton set out for Bolivia via Toronto and Santiago, Chile. At 68, he dreamed of finding a wife to bear him children — and what a wife. He pictured introducing her to his colleagues. One thing worried him, though. She had told him that men hit on her all the time. How did that acclaim affect her? Did it go to her head? But he remembered how comforting it felt to be chatting with her, like having a companion in the next room. And he knew she loved him. She’d said so many times

Frampton didn’t plan on a long trip. He needed to be back to teach. So he left his car at the airport. Soon, he hoped, he’d be returning with Milani on his arm. The first thing that went wrong was that the e-ticket Milani sent Frampton for the Toronto-Santiago leg of his journey turned out to be invalid, leaving him stranded in the Toronto airport for a full day. Frampton finally arrived in La Paz four days after he set out. He hoped to meet Milani the next morning, but by then she had been called away to another photo shoot in Brussels.

She promised to send him a ticket to join her there, so Frampton, who had checked into the Eva Palace Hotel, worked on a physics paper while he waited for it to arrive. He and Milani kept in regular contact. A ticket to Buenos Aires eventually came, with the promise that another ticket to Brussels was on the way. All Milani asked was that Frampton do her a favor: bring her a bag that she had left in La Paz

While in Bolivia, Frampton corresponded with an old friend, John Dixon, a physicist and lawyer who lives in Ontario. When Frampton explained what he was up to, Dixon became alarmed. His warnings to Frampton were unequivocal, Dixon told me not long ago, still clearly upset: “I said: ‘Well, inside that suitcase sewn into the lining will be cocaine. You’re in big trouble.’ Paul said, ‘I’ll be careful, I’ll make sure there isn’t cocaine in there and if there is, I’ll ask them to remove it.’ I thought they were probably going to kidnap him and torture him to get his money. I didn’t know he didn’t have money. I said, ‘Well, you’re going to be killed, Paul, so whom should I contact when you disappear?’ And he said, ‘You can contact my brother and my former wife.’ ” Frampton later told me that he shrugged off Dixon’s warnings about drugs as melodramatic, adding that he rarely pays attention to the opinions of others.

On the evening of Jan. 20, nine days after he arrived in Bolivia, a man Frampton describes as Hispanic but whom he didn’t get a good look at handed him a bag out on the dark street in front of his hotel. Frampton was expecting to be given an Hermès or a Louis Vuitton, but the bag was an utterly commonplace black cloth suitcase with wheels. Once he was back in his room, he opened it. It was empty. He wrote to Milani, asking why this particular suitcase was so important. She told him it had “sentimental value.” The next morning, he filled it with his dirty laundry and headed to the airport.

Frampton flew from La Paz to Buenos Aires, crossing the border without incident. He says that he spent the next 40 hours in Ezeiza airport, without sleeping, mainly “doing physics” and checking his e-mail regularly in hopes that an e-ticket to Brussels would arrive. But by the time the ticket materialized, Frampton had gotten a friend to send him a ticket to Raleigh. He had been gone for 15 days and was ready to go home. Because there was always the chance that Milani would come to North Carolina and want her bag, he checked two bags, his and hers, and went to the gate. Soon he heard his name called over the loudspeaker. He thought it must be for an upgrade to first class, but when he arrived at the airline counter, he was greeted by several policemen. Asked to identify his luggage — “That’s my bag,” he said, “the other one’s not my bag, but I checked it in” — he waited while the police tested the contents of a package found in the “Milani” suitcase. Within hours, he was under arrest.


I first met Frampton this past fall in the prison warden’s office in Devoto, one of the few remaining old-style jails in Buenos Aires, so dilapidated that its windows stick open and rain leaks through the roof. It was September, the beginning of spring in the Southern Hemisphere, but there was still a chill in the air, and the prison heating system was down as usual.

“Hey Professor, have you won the Nobel yet?” a guard shouted as Frampton walked by. He was wearing a red Adidas tracksuit (“Adidas seems to have a franchise in Devoto,” he said), running shoes and a tattered Barbour coat to keep warm. “This is the coat the royal family wears, it’s for hunting,” Frampton, who grew up in Britain, pointed out. “See, it has this pocket in the back where you can put a dead bird.” Frampton had been in Devoto for eight months, awaiting trial on charges of transporting two kilos of cocaine into the country. He was housed not in a single cell but in a group pavilion with 80 men accused of drug dealing or smuggling, most of them from other Latin American countries. Frampton had had almost no experience with drugs in his life, apart from the occasional drink and a nicotine addiction (he’d given up smoking two years before). Now he was living with people who were not only well versed in the intricacies of the drug trade but regular users of marijuana and cocaine. The pavilion was often illuminated at night by little flames held under spoons, as inmates cooked paco, a cocaine paste similar to crack that is often made with kerosene and sulfuric acid. But there were good things about not being in a private cell, too. A number of the prisoners on the pavilion had their own TVs. On Sunday mornings, Frampton would turn on the classical-music station, Arpeggio, so he could listen for a few hours before others got up and switched the channel back to music videos. Whenever his case was reported on local news channels, pictures of Denise Milani would flash across the TV screen, eliciting catcalls and applause from the other prisoners.

“I’m a bit of a celebrity in here,” Frampton said. From the moment of his arrest he had maintained that he was the victim of a scam — even if it didn’t occur to him right away that the Milani with whom he was corresponding was not the real Milani — and he projected a sense that all that had happened to him was a mistake that would soon be resolved. Perfectly congenial, he kept punctuating my questions about his present predicament with “And after this, we’ll get to physics, right?”

Finally, eyes burning with schoolboy enthusiasm, interrupted now and then by a spasmodic cough — he has a lung condition, which the smoke-filled prison air worsened — he talked me through what he called his “14 groundbreaking discoveries,” which he had written out for me on a piece of notepaper. Frampton closed our interview half-seriously, half-impishly, with another kind of calculation: “I’ve co-authored with three Nobel laureates. Only 11 theoretical physicists have done that. Six out of those 11 have won Nobel Prizes themselves. Following this logic, I have a 55 percent chance of getting the Nobel.”

How Frampton, who holds an endowed chair at the University of North Carolina and has been an adviser to the Department of Energy, ended up in Devoto appears at first to be a classic tale: a brilliant man of science gets into trouble as soon as he tries to navigate the real world. Since his arrest, he has certainly cultivated this notion, burnishing his wacky-scientist profile with lines like “That’s my naïveté” and “My mind works in a strange way.”

Those who know him well also portray him as a kind of idiot savant, someone who could have been easily duped by whoever was posing as Milani. “Women came later in Paul’s life,” says Richard Czerniawski, a chemist who was a student with Frampton at Oxford University and now lives in Buenos Aires. Frampton was married for the first time at age 50, to Anne-Marie Frampton, then 52, a Frenchwoman living in the United States, who calls herself a physics groupie: “I couldn’t completely follow everything Paul said, because of the mathematics, of course, but either I could understand the words, or I could just listen to the music, the music of physics.” The pair divorced in 2008 but are still on good terms. Anne-Marie describes her ex-husband as a very good scientist with the emotional age of a 3-year-old. “I was flabbergasted, flabbergasted but not surprised,” she said, referring to the call she received from Frampton from Devoto prison. “Paul is a very experienced traveler, but that sentence, ‘Don’t take any luggage that doesn’t belong to you,’ he doesn’t even hear that. He’s in another world, an alternate universe.”

One story about his search for a new wife certainly bolstered this view. Shortly after his divorce, Frampton, then 64, expressed concern about finding a wife between the ages of 18 and 35, which Frampton understood to be the period when women are most fertile. One particularly promising candidate was a young Chinese woman. After an extended e-mail correspond­ence, Frampton arranged to see her during a trip to China to visit another eminent scientist, but they met for only an hour, and “it didn’t go anywhere.” The next important contender appears to have been Milani. “He told me to look her up on the Internet,” Dixon recalled. “I thought he was out of his mind, and I told him that. ‘You’re not talking to the real girl. Why would a young woman like that be interested in an old guy like you?’ But he really believed that he had a pretty young woman who wanted to marry him.” When I later asked Frampton what made him think that Milani was interested, he replied, “Well, I have been accused of having a huge ego.”

Over the course of three and a half months, Frampton called my house 42 times from jail. He’d call to report the latest news. A “brilliant” op-ed he published in a Raleigh newspaper about the U.N.C. provost’s “illegal” action — cutting off his salary without any due process — had succeeded in getting the provost fired. (The provost had granted Frampton 60 days of paid leave, then suspended his salary until he could resume his duties as a faculty member. Frampton sued the university, unsuccessfully, for his wages.) He was particularly pleased about the provost’s dismissal, because the severance of his salary had had real repercussions. Apparently without savings, he was unable to afford a private lawyer and had to rely on an overburdened Argentine public defender. He’d given up his health insurance and risked losing his car and apartment in Chapel Hill. In Argentina, he scrambled to get the money he needed to buy himself decent food in prison and telephone cards, of which he might have as many as 30 in his pocket.

It turned out that the provost was stepping down voluntarily in June 2013 and would remain as a faculty member. Frampton didn’t seem sheepish about having linked the provost’s fate to his own. He was excited about something else now. The president of Harvard, he’d heard, had been given a memo about his case in hopes that she’d mention it to Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, during Kirchner’s visit to the university. “I think I’ve never been discussed by two such important people in my life,” Frampton reflected. (Harvard’s president never received any memo about Frampton, and she and Kirchner never did discuss his case.) Or he’d report, ever hopefully, that he’d be out on house arrest any day. (His Argentine public attorney, Ignacio Anitua, had requested that his client be placed on house arrest, given his age and his pulmonary ailment, but the request was still wending its way through official channels.) He asked me to bring him Gruyère, blue cheese, curry powder, chili pepper, notebooks, reading glasses and telephone cards, and he expressed frustration about the slow progress of his case. He was especially exasperated that the text messages on his confiscated cellphone from Jan. 20, the day of the bag exchange, had still not been handed over to his defense lawyer by the police, despite repeated requests. “It’s clear from those messages that it was not my bag,” he said. “That should be sufficient to exonerate me.” (His public defender told me that the text messages were actually in his file but would never be enough to prove his innocence.)

One Monday, Frampton called three times. The first time was at 3 p.m. He was animated and talked at length about the “volatile situation” at the university, which had yet to reinstate his salary, despite letters of support from the Nobel laureate Sheldon Lee Glashow and from John C. Taylor, emeritus professor of physics at the University of Cambridge, among others. “Research institutions throughout the country are in jeopardy if a tenured professor of 30 years has his salary suddenly revoked without any due process,” Frampton said. “This means that the jobs of tens of thousands of tenured professors are at risk.”

Second call, 6 p.m.: Frampton reported that he was a month into his prison stay before his fellow prisoners managed to convince him that the woman he thought he’d been in touch with all this time had probably been a man impersonating her. The real Denise Milani was never accused of having a role in the drug smuggling and has no connection to Frampton. “The only real connection we have is through the international media,” Frampton admitted. Milani, who was interviewed for The Daily Mail, expressed alarm about having her name associated with drug smugglers, fear for herself, her 12-year-old son and “sympathy” for the professor. “I feel sympathy for her, too,” Frampton said. (Despite repeated attempts, Milani could not be reached for comment.)

Third call, 8 p.m.: “There could be retribution. I could be assassinated.” He spoke about how he had overheard the dealers and smugglers he was now living with talking about what happens to drug mules who lose the stash. He said people had told him someone must have been watching him move around at the airport, so they knew what he looked like. “These thoughts keep me up at night.”

Frampton is prone to seeing himself as the center of the action whatever the milieu. When he was growing up in Worcestershire, England, in what he describes as a “lower-middle-class family,” his mother encouraged him to report his stellar grades to all the neighbors, a practice that may have led the young Frampton to confuse worldly laurels with love. At 18, he enrolled at Brasenose College, Oxford, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1968. He received a number of offers for postdocs, including one at Princeton and another at the University of Chicago. His advisers suggested he go to Chicago to work with the Japanese physicist Yoichiro Nambu. Nambu was an intellectual giant in the field, but Frampton’s advisers may have had other reasons for steering Frampton his way. Nambu, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in 2008, has, Frampton told me, “astonishingly no ego.”

As Frampton tells it, his life is one unbroken line of impressive grades, advanced degrees and innumerable citations of his work in cosmology and physics. There is certainly much truth to this. “He has always been very inventive in thinking of new ideas extending and going beyond the standard model of particle physics,” says Prof. Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. But then there is Frampton’s tendency to transfer his professional accomplishments to his personal life. In what a fellow physicist described as a “very vain, very inappropriate” talk delivered on the 80th birthday of Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate in physics, Frampton veered into autobiography, recounting how his ability to multiply numbers in his head at 4 led him to see himself as “cleverer than Newton.” This line became a refrain throughout the talk. Interspersed with the calculations and hypotheses were his Oxford grades, which, he said, showed that he, like Newton, was in the top 1 percentile for intelligence. Frampton insists that he was merely joking and that his sense of humor was misinterpreted as self-regard. Yet in many of my conversations with him, he seemed to cling to the idea of his own exceptionalism. During our first meeting, when I asked him what attracted him to Milani, he said, “Not to offend present company,” referring to me and the representative from the penitentiary service, “but, to start with, she’s in the top 1 percentile of how women look.” And in an e-mail to Milani — or, rather, the fake Milani — Frampton wrote, “As these days tick by, and I think about it a lot, the more I realize that we are the perfect couple in all respects.”

The strategy of Frampton’s defense team was to present Frampton as a brilliant man out of touch with day-to-day life. They called in a psychologist, who pronounced him unusually gullible without, however, diagnosing a mental illness. The judges sent their own doctor, who declared Frampton normal. A total of three psychological evaluations were presented at the trial, and two agreed that he had the traits of a narcissistic personality — an overblown and unrealistic image of himself. One concluded that it did not constitute a pathology, while the other suggested that there were pathological aspects to his narcissism that led to gaps in his understanding of reality.

Fidel Schaposnik, a physics professor at the National University of La Plata, which, along with the University of Buenos Aires, had offered Frampton a visiting professorship to help get him released from Devoto while he awaited trial, said of Frampton: “He’s a typical person trained at Oxford. He knows he’s part of an elite and can’t imagine such things would happen to him.” Indeed, Frampton sees academia’s denizens as creative misfits who deserve special protection. “People who are socially inept can nevertheless be the most creative people,” he told me one afternoon on the telephone. “It’s very important that they can’t be fired. This is the genius of tenure.”

There had been a case similar to Frampton’s in the past year, that of a New Zealander named Sharon Armstrong. Like Frampton, Armstrong, a former executive at the Maori Language Commission, said she met her lover on an Internet dating site and, after months of online contact, made a plan to meet him abroad, passing through Buenos Aires on her way to London to pick up some important paper contracts for him. She was caught carrying a bag with five kilos of cocaine. After the two were mentioned together in a number of articles, Armstrong contacted Frampton. The judges in her case — she received a sentence of 4 years 10 months — were also going to be the judges in his.

According to Rusty Payne, a spokesman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, if Frampton and Armstrong were unaware of their involvement, they would be the exception. He had never heard of a case in which a virtual “honey trap” had been used to dupe someone into being an unwitting drug mule. “When it comes to drug trafficking, we rarely see someone duped or used as part of a ruse,” he said. “It is very typical for those arrested to claim no knowledge or involvement.” The prosecutor in Frampton’s case, Mario Villar — 80 percent of his cases involve drug smuggling — concurred. It is highly improbable, he said, that a person is unaware that he or she is carrying drugs. Frampton acknowledged that this was undoubtedly true — most of the time. Of the other 79 prisoners on his pavilion, he thought none were innocent. “Some people will say they’re innocent, but when I talk to them further, it becomes clear that they were somehow involved. I think people like me are less than 1 percent.”

Three weeks before his trial, Frampton hired private lawyers. When I asked how he was able to afford them, he first said he’d rather not tell me, then claimed that friends in Argentina were footing the bill. The new lawyers picked up where his public defenders left off, yet at a significantly accelerated pace. On Oct. 30, I spoke to Frampton as he was driving away from Devoto, accompanied by his friend, Czerniawski, who had agreed to take Frampton in on house arrest. Giddily, he said that the first thing he wanted to do was to sleep in, impossible in prison because every morning at 7:30 they do the roll call.

The following day at midday, I met Frampton at the Czerniawskis’ three-bedroom apartment, just blocks away from the Argentine Parliament. Dressed in a dark blue pinstriped suit and a tie covered with tiny red-beaked penguins, Frampton was finishing lunch with Czerniawski’s wife, Silvia, and their two daughters. “See,” he said, “I’m Paul Frampton again.” Czerniawski was at work. When I asked Frampton if he had slept in, he said he spent half the night on the Internet, reading through all the latest discoveries in his field, checking to see what his “competitors” had been working on, and beginning to answer the thousands of e-mails he received. He reported that he had more citations than ever. The conversation turned to his long-awaited release to house arrest. How had the new lawyers achieved so quickly what his public attorney had been requesting for more than four months? “They say they drink maté with the judges,” Frampton answered cryptically. Later he added, “A little bird told me that if I get off, I’ll never know why.”

He showed me his latest calculations, pages of beautifully rendered symbols with not a word in sight except for “Nestor Kirchner,” the former president and deceased husband of current president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, written in the margin. “I’m trying to connect the God particle, the Higgs boson, with dark energy — you know, the thing that makes the universe accelerate. This sounds a bit egomaniacal, but to understand dark energy, I think we have to be open-minded about Einstein’s general relativity.”

This time, he was the one who brought the conversation back around to drug smuggling, showing palpable anxiety about the outcome of his trial. He told me uneasily that his lawyers had reported that nearly all drug-smuggling cases that came to trial ended in guilty verdicts.

As I was leaving, he stepped out with me into the hallway. “Can I do this?” he asked, wondering if he was violating his house arrest. He got into the elevator, a wrought-iron cage that offered a view of the stairs as it descended, and repeated, “Can I do this?” He accompanied me down another long hall to the entrance and gave me a kiss on the cheek goodbye, peering out at the street as the door closed.

Two weeks later, on Nov. 12, Frampton’s trial began in a small wood-paneled courtroom, where he sat before three judges. On exhibit in front of the judges was a collapsed black cloth suitcase with wheels wrapped in yellow cellophane.

Frampton’s long-held defense — that he was duped because he had a childlike understanding of the ways of the world — began to unravel. The prosecutor opened his cross-examination of Frampton by citing a text message retrieved from Frampton’s confiscated cellphone. “On Jan. 22 at 9:46 a.m.,” he said, “you wrote from Ezeiza airport to the person you understood to be Denise Milani: ‘Was worried only about sniffer dogs but more.’ ” As his interrogation of Frampton continued, he read other text messages sent from Frampton’s phone. One at 9:52 a.m.: “Need to know if your loyalty is with the bad guy-agent & bolivian friends — or good guy, your husband?” And another at 9:56 a.m.: “SIRU” — the Hotel Siru, where they were planning to meet in Brussels — “IS AMBUSH.” 10:14 a.m.: “Your naivety is bad for me, us. This is millions. NO SIRU, OK?” At 11:19 a.m., Frampton sent Milani an e-mail: “This stuff is worth nothing in Bolivia, but $Ms in Europe. You meet me at the airport and we do not go near the hotel the ‘agent’ suggested. Stay at another hotel.” At 11:47 a.m., there was another text message: “Monday arrival changed. You must not tell the coca-goons.” At 12:16 p.m., he wrote: “WHY ARE YOU IGNORING ME? AT THIS LAST MOMENT. WE DID NOT DECIDE HOW TO MEET TOMORROW IN BRUSSELS AND KEEP COCA & LIVES. AT SIRU WE MAY LOSE BOTH!!” At 1:06: “We may do cool 1,000,000.”

Frampton explained to the judges that these messages were jokes. He’d made them up because of Dixon’s earlier warnings about drugs. “I was trying to keep Denise amused. I had already decided to fly back to North Carolina.” But even taking Frampton’s peculiar brand of humor into account, it was hard to understand why he would have taken the joke so far. He sent 30 messages like this, with specific details that made it seem as if he were referring to a real situation, a considered plan, not fabricating a story on the spot. Or did he think that whoever was behind the man who came to the hotel with the suitcase might hurt Milani if he didn’t agree to take the bag? While for much of his life Frampton seems to have had little interest in money, he may well have seen his actions as a strategy to prove to Milani once and for all that he was indeed the husband of her dreams — a knight slaying dragons.

The defense worked to show that far from hatching some elaborate plot, Frampton was unconcerned about the contents of the bag. Footage from airport security cameras showed him getting up from a cafe table and wandering off, leaving his open laptop and his two bags — his own white one and Milani’s black one — unattended for up to 25 minutes at a time, gazing in shop windows, talking to security personnel, standing at an airline counter, returning to his abandoned luggage and then, an hour or so later, repeating the operation. Would anyone, even a wacky scientist, behave this way if he knew he was transporting two kilos of cocaine?

And if Frampton’s behavior was innocent, it still called for an explanation. Who leaves his bags unattended in an airport? Frampton, apparently. “I’ve seen him in airports,” his ex-wife said, “He leaves all his bags and goes for half an hour somewhere else.”

The prosecution continued to press its case, producing a piece of paper on which Frampton had written:

“1 gram 200 dollars

2,000 grams 400,000 dollars.”

The amount of cocaine found in the bag Frampton was carrying was 1,980 grams. When asked why he’d been making this calculation, Frampton said: “My mind works in a strange way.” That evening, Frampton told me on the telephone, “I made those calculations in the airport office after having been arrested,” a fact that his defense team stressed the following day, noting Frampton’s tendency to make random calculations. They asked him to explain another notation on the same piece of paper that read “5 standard deviations 99.99994%.” “The criterion for the discovery of the Higgs boson had to be 5 standard deviations, which means it’s extremely unlikely to be a statistical fluctuation,” Frampton explained. He was “calculating the probability that Denise Milani would become my second wife, which was almost a certainty.” Pursuing this line of questioning, his lawyer asked whether Frampton was also calculating the weight of one of the judges.

“I’m embarrassed to admit it, but yes,” Frampton answered. “I calculated that he must weigh 100 kilos.”

“You calculated badly, as badly as you did about your second marriage,” the judge responded. “I’m 124 kilos.”

On the third and last day of the trial, the defense exhibited love letters Frampton had written to Denise Milani that they recovered from his Gmail account. They were full of tenderness, vividly imagining their life together in Chapel Hill. She wouldn’t need to work at first; she could accompany him to the office, make friends at the gym, the cafeteria and the supermarket; they’d take walks on the beach, and soon their little baby would arrive. Eventually she could get a contract with Victoria’s Secret. A response from Milani exhibited matching tenderness: “You’re the best thing that’s happened in my cursed life.” But the judges were apparently unmoved by these declarations of love. As Frampton’s former defense lawyer said, “The only thing that matters as far as the law is concerned is whether Frampton knew there were drugs in the bag. Whether he did it for money or a woman doesn’t matter.”

On Nov. 19, Frampton was sentenced to 4 years 8 months for drug smuggling.

After the trial, Frampton said his lawyers had forbidden him to speak to me, fearing that he might say something “stupid.” But three weeks later, this injunction was lifted, and I went to visit him again at the Czerniawskis’, where he remains under house arrest. With credit for the time he has already spent in custody, Frampton is expected to be released in May 2014. (Under Argentine law, a foreigner must serve half his sentence but can then be expelled from the country, and the penalty is then considered discharged.) It was a hot summer day, and he was dressed casually this time, in a light blue polo shirt, white shorts, black socks and black sneakers. He was still insisting on his innocence, but a new wariness had crept into his manner. He asked me several questions about myself, as if trying to gauge with each word which version of Paul Frampton I believed. He reported that U.N.C. would not make any decisions about his position on the faculty until it heard the results of his appeal, which could be months away. (U.N.C. confirmed that Frampton still has his position but that his current salary is $0.) His lawyers were using the same strategy they had previously, but introducing further evidence, like the complete record of his Yahoo Messenger chats with Milani, which he felt sure would exonerate him. “It shows unambiguously,” he said later, “that the only reason I went to South America was to meet Denise Milani.” For his part, Frampton had been working on two papers simultaneously. “So I can rest assured that I’m not like Oscar Wilde,” he said. While in Devoto, he checked out a copy of Oscar Wilde’s “Picture of Dorian Gray,” destined for English-language learners, from the prison library. He read in the preface that after Wilde’s stay in prison, he gave up writing. “That really affected me. He lost his confidence.”

The night before, Frampton told me, he watched the Nobel Prize ceremony live in Stockholm. He described to me how the king of Sweden presented the prizes in a concert hall, adding that he had been there once himself. His greatest dream was “to have a prediction verified by experimentation.” This, he explained, was how you win the Nobel as a theoretical particle physicist. “That would bring an enormous sense of fulfillment, quite apart from the Nobel Prize,” he said. “ ‘I predicted a particle that’s actually in the universe.’ Wouldn’t that be a rush? Much better than other ways of getting a lot of dopamine.” Later in the conversation, he reflected: “I’ve written 450 papers, an absurd number. A typical professor writes 100 in his career. I don’t regret my work in physics, but I have made sacrifices.” When asked what kind of sacrifices, he responded as if the answer were obvious, “Well, I don’t have a family.”


One of Frampton’s last e-mails to Denise Milani was written on a pirated cellphone a month into his stay inside Devoto prison: “I only think of cuddling all day and having sex all night with Denise Milani. How can you prove that you are Denise Milani?”

Is Distance Learning for You? Ready to Make Millions?

Recently I was contacted by Nick Christensen, the content editor of the University of Liverpool on his search for Industry thought leaders in business and career advancement, Nick found my site Millionaire Man to be impressive  therefore we agreed a mutual cooperation and here it is... his first guest post to my blog please Enjoy:

For years you've thought about something different. A different career, a different path. Or perhaps you're just finishing high school and trying to figure out what you should do next. Unfortunately, you don't have the opportunity to attend a traditional college or university full-time due to other commitments. In that case, an online degree can give you the advantage you need to improve your career. However, online degrees aren't for everyone.

Typical Students May Struggle

An online education isn't a short cut. In fact, in some cases, it takes students more time to complete an online course than it does to complete an in-class course. The reason? Online classes require a lot of reading and writing – both of which take more time than listening and speaking.

However, despite the additional work required, there are some benefits. Students may get more individualized attention, as they'll be communicating directly with educators through email and forum posts. You also get to set your own schedule, which is great if you need to learn after work hours.

Before pursuing an online degree, you need to ask yourself three questions.

Are you disciplined?

One of the major differences between an online education and a traditional education is that you won't be held accountable by anyone but yourself. Yes, you may face deadlines, but as there isn't likely to be a strict class schedule, you'll have to schedule your own class time. When you have an essay due, you need to be able to skip going out with friends. It's not always easy to say no, and if you know you have problems with discipline, earning a degree online is going to be very difficult.

Can you manage your time?

Time management is a crucial skill for all students to learn, but particularly online students. In a classroom setting, your teacher will tell you how to manage your time – which parts of the textbook you need to review, what you'll need to study for upcoming tests. You may not have that information when you take courses online.

In addition, if you take multiple courses at the same time, you'll need to know how to prioritize. Do you spend your Saturday night studying for a test on Monday or working on an essay?

Have you done your research?

A lot of people fantasize about what an online degree entails. However, not all schools are created equal. Before jumping in, you should know the cost of the program, whether there is accreditation, whether potential employers respect the school, and how the online classes work. You need to research several different programs before deciding which one to select. If you haven't researched at least three different options, you haven't done enough research.

Earning an online degree is a unique opportunity. However, before blindly following the path, make sure you're online learning is right for you.

For more information about pursuing an online degree from the University of Liverpool, click here.

Author Bio

Nick is on the blog outreach team at Liverpool University Online. Check us out on Facebook here.

The Gold Wrapping Paper worth Millions

Let it snow let it snow let it snow let the snowball grow until we fulfill our dreams, after the traditional Christmas eve celebration I feel that the search of one Million Euros in less than 5 years is coming to an end, just like this 2012 which gave us great pleasures.

 Here it is… the second of our 3 Christmas tales just to keep the Spirit up and Thank for all that we already have. Enjoy!!!

Once upon a time, there was a man who worked very hard just to keep food on the table for his family. This particular year a few days before Christmas, he punished his little five-year-old daughter after learning that she had used up the family's only roll of expensive gold wrapping paper.

As money was tight, he became even more upset when on Christmas Eve he saw that the child had used all of the expensive gold paper to decorate one shoebox she had put under the Christmas tree. He also was concerned about where she had gotten money to buy what was in the shoebox.

Nevertheless, the next morning the little girl, filled with excitement, brought the gift box to her father and said, "This is for you, Daddy!"

As he opened the box, the father was embarrassed by his earlier overreaction, now regretting how he had punished her.

But when he opened the shoebox, he found it was empty and again his anger flared. "Don't you know, young lady," he said harshly, "when you give someone a present, there's supposed to be something inside the package!"

The little girl looked up at him with sad tears rolling from her eyes and whispered: "Daddy, it's not empty. I blew kisses into it until it was all full."

The father was crushed. He fell on his knees and put his arms around his precious little girl. He begged her to forgive him for his unnecessary anger.

An accident took the life of the child only a short time later. It is told that the father kept this little gold box by his bed for all the years of his life. Whenever he was discouraged or faced difficult problems, he would open the box, take out an imaginary kiss, and remember the love of this beautiful child who had put it there. 

In a very real sense, each of us has been given an invisible golden box filled with unconditional love and kisses from our children, family, friends and God. There is no more precious possession anyone could hold. Enjoy these two versions of JOY!

From homeless to Millionaire

Now that we are all experiencing the quiet calm of December, with all the Christmas spirits flowing all around, and with the ideal of 1 Million euros in less than 5 years, I have decided to write 3 Inspiring Christmas tales to end the year 2012 a year that increased our Investments in about 17% that gave me 17 more business partners and allowed my family to drive a nice new car... and this is just the beginning 2013 will be a Magical year I can already feel it. 

So the first of my Christmas tales is related to Chris Gardner  a former homeless man turned millionaire — Gardner often remembers the train station bathroom where he once slept a quarter century ago. 

Often he is overcome with memories of teaching his 2-year-old son to never, ever open the locked bathroom door, no matter how hard someone pounded on the other side. 

It didn't matter that he now had three homes — one a condo in New York's Trump Tower — or that he'd gone from selling his own blood to buying Michael Jordan's car.

"He had to get out of there," 

The story of how the 52-year-old Gardner did just that, climbed out of homelessness and became a Millionaire stockbroker with his own 15-employee Chicago firm, was turned into a motion picture, a few years ago. It’s also the subject of Gardner’s own book, “The Pursuit of Happyness.” The unique spelling of “happiness” is intentional.

Even in the realm of rags-to-riches tales, Gardner's story is unique. Take, for example, the events that led to his descent into homelessness.

A medical supplies salesman barely making enough money to support his girlfriend and baby, Gardner had one of those Hollywood moments in a San Francisco parking lot in 1981 when he spotted a man looking for a place to park his red Ferrari.

"He said to him, 'You can have my (parking) place but I've got to ask you two questions. What do you do and how do you do it?'" recalled Gardner.

The man was a stockbroker. Gardner didn't know a single stockbroker or even what one did. But the man said he made $80,000 a month — $50,000 more than Gardner made a year.

Gardner found a brokerage firm willing to hire him and quit his job. But when he showed up for work he learned the guy who'd hired him had been fired. Gardner's job was gone.

Then, days before a scheduled interview with Dean Witter, a loud fight with his girlfriend brought the police to his door. The next thing Gardner knew they were asking him for $1,200 to clear up some unpaid parking tickets.

They may as well have asked for $12 million. Gardner spent 10 days in jail.

When he was released, his girlfriend and son were gone. He had no money, no home and the only clothes he had for his job interview the next day were the ones he wore to jail.

How was he going to explain showing up wearing jeans and paint-splattered Adidas shoes?

"I couldn't think of nothing that could top the truth," he said. He went with that and got the job.

A few months later came a knock on the door of the boarding house where he was staying.

"It's my ex and, guess what, she doesn't want the baby any more, here." he said. "The boarding house does not allow children. That's how we became homeless."

Some nights they stayed in a $25-a-night hotel, a park or under his desk at work. And a few nights were spent in an Oakland Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station.

"I had to teach my little boy how to play a game and the game is called SHHHH," he said. "That means no matter what anybody says on the other side of that door, no matter how much noise they make or what they threaten, we ain't here, OK?"

Finally, they moved into a homeless hotel in San Francisco, run by Glide Memorial United Methodist Church.

"There were no keys, so every day you take everything with you," said Gardner. "For a year, I'd take my son, his stroller, a big duffel bag with all his clothes in it, my briefcase, an umbrella, the biggest bag of Pampers in the world, one suit on my back and one suit in a hanging bag and we'd hit it every day."

When it rained, he covered the stroller with plastic sheets he'd picked up from dry cleaners.

Gardner told his co-workers nothing.

He also distinguished himself from others who turned to Glide for food and shelter.

"If you saw a man with a child, that was rare, incredibly rare," said the Rev. Cecil Williams, Glide's pastor. "I remember discussions about him, about how that man really loves that boy because he won't let him get away from him, he won't push him aside."

Starting from scratch 

Day care took a huge chunk of his meager stockbroker trainee salary, and it took Gardner about a year to save enough to move himself and his son into their own home. From there, his his career blossomed, and in 1987 he opened his own firm in Chicago.

Today, signs of his success are everywhere, starting with an office that includes a gleaming desk made of a DC-10 tail wing, African art work, boxing gloves and photographs autographed by Muhammad Ali. Sharing space with pictures of his adult son and daughter are photographs of Gardner with Nelson Mandela, and a vase full of dirt that Gardner brought from Mandela's yard after visiting the former South Africa president.

He no longer has the Ferrari he bought from Jordan.

Making a difference 

Gardner, who never went to college, has contributed tens of thousands of dollars to education, writing checks for as much as $25,000 to teachers, janitors, bus drivers and others who work at schools.

Gardner is focusing much of his attention now on South Africa, trying to persuade major investors to invest $1 billion there — an effort praised by South African officials.

"In the current state of our economy, creating an investment fund is critical," said Yusuf Omar, South African Consul General in Chicago, who recently stopped by Gardner's office.

For Gardner, helping South Africans pull themselves up makes perfect sense.

"Everything I've learned working on Wall Street, 25 years, to be able to make a difference in the lives of a lot of people and we all make money, it (doesn't) get any better than that," he said.

Imagine The Millions!

On my quest to make a Million Euros in less than five years summer is here so hot and bright
I realise that we are but an Ilussion, once John Lennon entitled a song "Imagine." Thoreau once said: "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined." Neville once said: "Imagination is the very gateway of reality."

Are you waking up to a new way of being? Can you feel something rumbling deep within you, calling out to live more creatively, successfully, joyfully? When you see a radiant beautifull face can you feel the need to kiss it?

The fragmented ways of your old thinking cannot bridge the divide between mind and matter, body and soul, challenges and dreams.

What if you build your finances, your business, your health, your relationships and your life around imagination and use your mental images, thoughts and feelings to attract the fulfillment of your dreams?

By intentionally shifting into new states of consciousness you can change your blueprints of reality and affect your world.


Imagination is power and you have it! Imagining creates reality, Use your Ilussion...

Life is a white paper.
So why are so many starving to death with unfulfilled desires? Laziness, complacency, no time, fear of the unknown - you name it and the excuses line up.It's up to you to change your subconscious mind with beneficial images of success. Doing this allows you to shift from undesirable patterns of being disempowered into habits that empower you.

Everything begins with a dream, a purpose or a goal.
Being able to focus and concentrate in the midst of chaos gives you the Winner's advantage.

You are a "focuser of energy." Focus plus uplifted emotional moods are the keys to your success. Whatever you do, never lose focus!

Everybody wants a better life, but if you do the same old things in the same old way you will get the same old results.

If a farmer plants corn seeds, he gets corn; he doesn't get tomatoes. If you focus on failure, poverty, or violent ideas how will you harvest success, wealth, or peace. If you want to change the results you are getting, you must change your images, because thought is creative.

How to begin? First you must have a desire that is far greater than what you are currently experiencing that´s the simple reason why I set my goal to one Million Euros not sixty thousand or one hundred but a Million.

The world is a series of pictures, frames in a piece of film, or states of consciousness. What you are conscious of is real to you because you think and feel it is real.

Your world is your very own personal mirror, forever mirroring your thoughts. It is your dream or your nightmare.

What would you dare to dream if you knew you could not fail?
What would be different in your life and how would you feel if you realized your dream?

The key to Intentional Creation is to know that everything is first created in your own imagination from an idea. It is then projected out into the world as experience. If your experiences aren't fulfilling, or what you had hoped for, then perhaps it is time to shift into a new state of awareness! and have always new challenges!

Just Imagine
Images or mental pictures are your prayers. Your inner blueprints (images) determine your behavior and the results you attract in life. They set the boundaries for what you can and cannot accept. Living your life without a proper success image is like building a house without a blueprint.

- Do you know how to design a success blueprint?
- Is your dream worthy of your talents and time?
- Would having it enable you to help those you love?
- What will becoming a conscious imagist do for you?

Here are some Keys to Fulfilling Your Dream and Achieving Your Goal:

Design a mind-compelling blueprint for success that has deep meaning for you to complete.

Propel yourself into action. Never despair over the time it takes for your dream to become a living reality.

Focus! Concentrate on your goal, not the challenge and you will burn a hole in anything that stands in the way of your success.

Expand your thoughts as you modify your habits and behavior.

Be patient. Recycle feelings of anger and fear into joy and gratitude.

Be receptive and responsive to inner guidance and outer assistance.

Success in any endeavor is measured by your belief in your deeper self.

Walk in the awareness of answered prayer.

What kind of mental image do you hold of yourself?
Everything you attract is an expression of your beliefs. Every person, your job, income, kinds of friends all correspond to your inner blueprints.

Nothing is impossible to Imagination not poverty, stress, and not even adversity. Riches are within your reach.

Anything you dream of - a healthy body, gainful employment, loyal friends, or a greater understanding of the Source of Supply can be summoned, once you consistently practice it. Imagine what you will attract once you know how to consciously use the Power of Imagination on your own behalf.


John Lennon - Imagine by hushhush112

Your ability to succeed is unlimited. Never close a door on a dream, your dreams are calling you!

Keep writting me, Enjoy the summer and Be Happy!!!