A warning for Substack users, and everyone else: fraud is all over the place. This Substack post provides examples of fraudulent activity; watch out!
https://open.substack.com/pub/johnebredehoft/p/anti-fraud-professionals-know-there
Crypto Transfers Without KYC
(Imagen 4)
Have you ever played a smartphone game that gives you a teeny bit of crypto?
So little crypto that it’s not measured in Bitcoin, but in satoshis (where 100 million satoshis equals one bitcoin)?
If so, you probably didn’t have to undergo a Know Your Customer (KYC) check to verify your financial identity.
Renno and Company explains why not:
“If a virtual currency transfer of $1,000 or more occurs, the client’s identity must be verified. This step is critical in the digital currency world, where anonymity can lead to misuse.
“If there is a virtual currency exchange of $1,000 or more, identity verification is also required. This helps ensure that all exchanges are transparent and not used for illegal purposes.”
If you find a smartphone game that pays more than $1,000 a pop…let me know.
And if you want to transact crypto, StealthEX supports no-KYC transactions:
“Thanks to StealthEX you can now purchase an amount of crypto without KYC if it’s less than $700 or the equivalent of this amount in other currencies. As long as your total purchases don’t exceed $700, you don’t have to verify your identity. You can make one big purchase or several small $20, $50 or $100 transactions. StealthEX allows users to seamlessly exchange their assets across chains in minutes without the need to verify their identity.”
Yeah, $700 rather than $1,000. StealthEX is…um…playing it safe.
My Latest Writings on Content and Proposals
Bredemarket’s latest writings on
- Blogs (How Long Should a Blog Post Be?) https://bredemarket.com/2025/07/09/how-long-should-a-blog-post-be/
- Case studies (Working With Your Customers on Case Studies) https://bredemarket.com/2025/07/10/working-with-your-customers-on-case-studies/
- White papers (When You Gate Content, You LOSE Control) https://bredemarket.com/2025/07/08/when-you-gate-content-you-lose-control/
- Proposals (Proposals and “Weasel Words”) https://bredemarket.com/2025/05/09/proposals-and-weasel-words/
If you can use my services in any of these areas, book a free 30 minute content needs assessment and talk to Bredemarket. https://bredemarket.com/mark/
Working With Your Customers on Case Studies
On Tuesday I published a LinkedIn article as part of Bredemarket’s “The Wildebeest Speaks” series. The title: “Does Word-of-Mouth Eliminate the Need for Bredemarket?“
Once I answered that question (I think you can guess my answer), I talked about how you can effectively combine word-of-mouth and corporate efforts via “casetimonials“—either case studies or testimonials that allow the happy customer to have their say, while your company helps to shape the message.
Focusing on case studies, I said the following:
Case studies require more collaboration, as I found out when I wrote a dozen case studies for a firm.
- We had to collaborate between myself, a few people from the firm, and representatives of the firm’s customers who could provide the facts.
- My Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service (these were short 2-page case studies) includes “access to the end customer for a 30 minute interview,” and I definitely accessed these customers.
- By the way, this is where I learned about using a paid online version of Microsoft Word as an audio transcription tool. I wrote these case studies before generative AI transcribers became popular.
So yes, much has changed over the last few years, but the need for you to communicate with your prospects remains.
Which is why you should solicit Bredemarket’s assistance. I can help create content for tech marketers. Contact me.
How Long Should a Blog Post Be?
(Imagen 4)
Abraham Lincoln reportedly said that “A man’s legs must be long enough to reach the ground.”
Whatever it takes.
What Are Fingerprint Minutiae?
(Imagen 4)
(Part of the biometric product marketing expert series)
Because many of the subscribers and followers of my Substack page aren’t fingerprint experts (although a few are), my posts on Substack tend to be more introductory. So I wrote this for Substack, but also decided to share it on the Bredemarket blog at some point.
So let’s define what fingerprint minutiae are.
To do this, look at the tip of one of the fingers on your hand…but not too closely. (Or just Level 2, not Level 3.)
If you look sort of closely at your fingertip, you see one commonality between (most) fingers and Ruffles: both have ridges. For purposes of this exercise, take a close look at where the ridges go.
- In some cases, the ridges just stop and go no further.
- In other cases, a single ridge splits into two or more ridges. Or if you want to follow a different perspective, two or more ridges combine into a single ridge. But that perspective screws up the discussion later.
- Ridges do other things which I will ignore for now.
The important things is that you can identify the specific point at which a ridge ending occurs. And you can identify the specific point of a bifurcation, where a ridge splits into two ridges. (If a ridge splits into three, that’s a trifurcation.)
Those ridge ending and bifurcation points? Those are the minutiae.
Human fingerprint examiners can identify these minutiae points.
So can the algorithms on an automated fingerprint identification system (AFIS) or an automated biometric identification system (ABIS).
And if two fingers have minutiae in the same locations, and don’t have minutiae in one finger that are not present on the other finger…then they’re the same finger. (I’m simplifying here, since the quality of the prints and the way the skin bends affect the ability to find minutiae.)
Which means that if the police find a fingerprint on a stolen car that doesn’t belong to the owner…
…and the minutiae on your finger match the minutiae on the print from the car…
…you’d better have a good lawyer.
Oh, and one more thing: you also have ridges, ridge endings, and bifurcations on your palms and toes. So don’t try to steal a car while barefoot.
From the Summer of Privacy to California SB 690
Harry Chambers of OneTrust gave a far-reaching overview of the worldwide state of privacy legislation this morning. Chambers covered a ton of topics, but I’m going to focus on proposed changes to the California Invasion of Privacy Act, or CIPA.
As Fisher Phillips notes, this is not a new act. And that’s the problem.
“CIPA was originally enacted in 1967 to combat traditional wiretapping and eavesdropping, primarily in the context of telephone communications. It was never designed to address the complexities of the digital age or regulate how businesses track user interactions on the internet.”
But that didn’t stop the lawyers. As Chambers noted, a ton of lawsuits tried to apply 1967 law to modern use cases, including (Fisher Phillips) “routine website technologies such as cookies, pixels, search bar/form, chatbots, and session replay tools.”
Heck, back in 1967 cookies made you high. Whoops, that’s brownies.
You can imagine how California technology businesses felt about this. Chatbots as illegal wiretapping? Ouch.
Enter California SB 690 to stop what Fisher Phillips called a “shakedown” (settle or you’ll go to court). It proposed to align CIPA with the “commercial business purposes” definition under CCPA as amended.
On June 3, the California Senate unanimously approved SB 690.
But submission to the California Assembly is delayed:
“On July 2, the author of SB 690, State Senator Anna Caballero (D-14), announced she was pausing SB 690, holding it in the Assembly until at least 2026. Caballero cited ‘outstanding concerns around consumer privacy,’ and acknowledged continued opposition from consumer privacy advocates and attorneys’ groups.”
So the lawsuits can continue until morale improves.
AI Still Has Bias
I’m writing a post about California and want to illustrate it with a picture of the Grateful Dead.
I wanted to include Bill Walton in the picture, trusting that Google Gemini knew who Bill Walton was.
It didn’t.
My first draft of the picture included a black basketball player. While many basketball players are black, Bill Walton isn’t.
Too lazy to describe Walton in detail, I just said he was tall and white and generated the picture above.
(Imagen 4)
Populating the Queue When You Can’t Pull the Trigger
In this post, I knew I wanted to talk about preparing content for a product marketing effort. One in which the content had to be ready when someone pulled the trigger.
But I suspected that Google Gemini wouldn’t permit generation of an appropriate “trigger” picture because of Google’s guardrails.
So I moved in a different direction.
Pulling the trigger
But what’s the trigger?
The trigger to move forward—with a product launch, an event, an unsolicited proposal, hatever.
But if you’re a product marketer, and it’s your product, why can’t you pull the trigger?
Storytelling time.
The date is the date, but what is the date?
I was brought into a particular project, where everyone was readying go-to-market content for an executive meeting on a particular date.
Both internal and external content.
Training, FAQs, presentations, videos, blog posts, press releases, email campaigns, landing pages, call scripts, the whole bit.
As it turned out, I authored a bunch of the content myself, and helped on most of the rest.
All of us working toward that executive meeting date.
Finally, the date arrived, and all the content was presented to the executive team, mostly ready to go.
The response?
“Not yet.”
Because at the executive level, the fate of one particular product is relatively minor, compared to the overall scope of the business.
Now what?
So was the effort wasted?
- If the product were eventually launched, then obviously not. The content is already queued. It’s much easier to go back in the queue and update old content than it is to wait until you get the go-ahead and THEN create brand new content. (In three days.)
- And if the product were never launched…it still may not be a wasted effort. The company will launch new products (unless the company is Rite Aid), and the (sorry for the next two words) lessons learned from the old product can apply to the new one.
Provided you have a repeatable system for going to market (part of your strategy and process documents, or perhaps something less formal if your founder despises process) that you can dust off in the future.
But if you need content for now, or even for later, Bredemarket can create content for tech marketers.
For Identity/Biometric Marketing Leaders Only (July 2025 version)
For identity/biometric marketing leaders only!
Make an impact with the biometric product marketing expert.
Bredemarket’s biometric product marketing expertise: https://bredemarket.com/bpme/
Discuss your content-proposal-analysis needs with me before your competitors steal your prospects: https://bredemarket.com/mark/
(New landing page.)
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