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Organised
as a weekly newsletter, it presents an overview of the current
international blockchain debate. You may find below a selection of the
best ideas from the most influential media.
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A Bitcoin Exchange Boss Thinks Jeff Bezos Will Trigger The Next Bull Run
Bitcoin
and cryptocurrency investors have battened down the hatches for what
could be a long crypto winter, the name given to the bitcoin bear
marketthat has mauled prices over recent weeks.
But many bitcoin and crypto faithful are eagerly looking towards the
next bitcoin price bull run, which they remain confident will come
eventually.
Now, the chief executive of major global bitcoin and cryptocurrency
exchange Binance, Changpeng Zhao, has said he expects Jeff Bezo's online
retail giant Amazon to be the catalyst for the next bitcoin bull run.
Changpeng Zhao, often known simply as CZ, took to Twitter to ask his
followers what they think the trigger for the next bitcoin bull run will
be. When one wag, Crypto Guy @Ankit4043, joked that CZ could spark a
bull run by buying all the bitcoins currently in circulation, CZ replied
that he couldn't but Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who's often the world's
richest person largely due to Amazon's soaring share price, perhaps
could.
"Easier to bring crypto to [Bezos]," CZ tweeted, in response to
@Ankit4043 suggesting CZ (who ahead of the recent rout that's wiped
billions of dollars from the cryptocurrency market predicted an incoming
bull run) should bring Bezos on board at Binance. "Waiting for the day
Amazon accepts (or issues) crypto," CZ said.
"I get asked [what will trigger the next bull run] often, and honestly, I
don't know the answer, other than keep building," CZ added.
December 10, 2018 by Billy Bambrough
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What’s More Volatile, Cryptocurrency or the Lira?
In Turkey’s uncertain economic climate, bitcoin is looking awfully good.
Near
the banks of Istanbul’s Golden Horn, a natural harbor that has
protected Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman trading ships for
thousands of years, a billboard displays the Turkish lira’s market rate:
its value in dollars, euros, pounds, and bitcoin. That last one might
be surprising, given that cryptocurrencies have experienced a massive
sell-off this year, with bitcoin plunging as much as 33 percent in
November. But its persistence in countries like Turkey points to the
future of money and the global financial system. Since October, as
bitcoin suffered record losses, trading volumes on Turkish
cryptocurrency exchanges increasedby 37 percent.
The summer’s lira crisis—in which Turks saw their life savings,
pensions, and investments significantly devalued—paired with the
country’s savvy youthful population could help explain why many are
searching for alternatives to fiat currency (money backed by government
regulation). A pair of recent surveys highlight the draw of
cryptocurrency in the country: An ING/Ipsos study conducted between
March 26 and April 6 (that is, before the lira crisis) found that 18
percent of Turks surveyed—compared with 9 percent of Europeans—own
cryptocurrency. The U.S. rate, according to the study, stood at 8
percent. A Turkish research firm called Twentify found similar numbers
in a poll taken after the lira crisis toward the end of August, when
bitcoin dropped by nearly 10 percent that month: Nearly one-fifth of survey respondents admitted to purchasing and selling Bitcoin.
The cryptocurrency community’s response to the lira crisis tells a story
of how geopolitics, emergent technologies, and financial speculators
can converge for better or worse. The short of it involves the fate of
an American pastor jailed in Turkey (who was released in August), and
retaliatory tariffs by the U.S. against Turkish steel and aluminum
imports. After Trump announced the tariffs via Twitter on Aug. 10, the
lira lost more than 20 percent of its value in one day. Though the lira
has since recovered much of its value, it is still down by more than 30
percent so far this year. Inflation also continues to be a major
concern, hitting a 15-year high in September. Analysts warn that the
Turkish economy could be heading into a recession.
December 10, 2018 by Sara Nasser
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https://slate.com/technology/2018/12/turkey-cryptocurrency-bitcoin-lira-volatility.html
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A string of great bitcoin calls makes this Chilean trader a must-follow
“Good morning
folks I want to introduce you to the power of bitcoins and I know that
you probably didn’t want to hear this on a silver channel but I have to
point out its amazing stuff.”
That was June 1, 2011, and it was not Tyler or Cameron Winklevoss, or
Barry Silbert or any other crypto heavyweight. It was Chilean software
developer Davinci Jeremie and going by his previous calls he might be
the least-known bitcoin guru.
In 2011, the gold and silver bug posted a video explaining how he had
recently stumbled across this new way to transfer something of value
when he made a donation to a local author. “I don’t have to pull out my
credit card I didn’t have to type in my address, remember my postal code
and all the rest of crap,” he said. “It was instant it was fast there’s
no middleman transaction taking a cut 3% cut or more of his money that I
sent him it was just smooth and easy.”
However, by the time Jeremie posted his first video about the nascent
cryptocurrency in June, he was well on his way to accumulating his
stash. He bought his first bitcoin in March 2011 for the princely sum of
$1 and at its peak, his portfolio consisted of 3,000 bitcoins and a
smattering of altcoins, or digital currencies other than bitcoin.
In a phone interview with MarketWatch, Jeremie said buying bitcoin early
on was not easy because the main source of liquidity was an exchange
that he refused to deal on, and which would lead to, arguably, his
greatest call.
In a 2013 video, he warned investors against holding money and bitcoins
with Tokyo-based exchange Mt. Gox. At the time, Mt. Gox was facilitating
more than half of all bitcoin transactions world-wide. “It is my
opinion that you should abandon Mt. Gox,” he said in a June 23, 2013,
video. “I would suggest you move out of it. Do the trade on the day and
get out. Do not leave money in there.”
Jeremie said prior hacks, coupled with worsening banking relationships,
led him to believe all was not well with the exchange. Six months later,
his fears were realized when Mt. Gox announced it had been hacked and
850,000 bitcoins had been stolen, which at the time were worth around
$450 million. The heist remains the largest in the history of bitcoin.
December 11, 2018 by Aaron Hankin
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Wisdom of the Crowd Could Be Ideal Model to Teach AI
We
are all familiar with some of the internet’s largest crowdsourcing
experiments, like Wikipedia and Amazon Mechanical Turk. But,
crowdsourcing today is being applied to new, high technologies, like
artificial intelligence. And it’s the crowd that could humanize our use
of AI and help imbue machines of the future with some much-needed common
sense.
The increasing resources being put into machine learning and AI ensure
that such platforms will only grow more intelligent. But these systems
are not yet self-learning. Still, optimism exists in high places for
crowdsourced systems.
For instance, Eric Schmidt, Chairman and long-serving CEO to Google, opined back in 2016 that the next
Google will be a crowdsourcing AI company. The crowd can work to label
and define data , such as to label a picture to be a sunrise or a
sunset. In the future, the crowd will provide diverse data sets, like
daily health information about the individual.
This would assist firms to develop new drugs, for instance, and the next
generation of crowdsourcing will see the crowd taking payment for data
or individuals offering data for free in order to help advance a good
cause.
Blockchain for the first time makes it economically feasible to send
regular micropayments. This brings potential to incentivize the world’s
foremost researchers and institutions to collaborate on a distributed or
decentralized version of Watson that’s owned not by a centralized
corporation, but rather token holders. This is the model pursued by
Seoul-based Mind AI.
It is this monetary incentive that could be key to pushing AI technology
forward as current AI technology is nowhere close to human
intelligence, at least in terms of general cognitive ability.
Modern AI doesn’t learn too quickly, and lacks the ability to adapt to
abstractions, reasoning, understanding language, and quickly changing
circumstances. Deep learning is rudimentary at best in certain language
tasks, planning and explaining why actions are undertaken.
There are also questions about the nature of the crowd. What if, in the
future, crowds themselves include machines collaborating with the group?
Crowdsourcing will then take an interesting turn and involve many
people and machines and platforms working together in real-time to
generate data and insights.
Could it be that top researchers and research institutions will earn tokens alongside robots?
December 12, 2018 by Aubrey Hansen
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UNICEF Adds Six Blockchain Startups From Developing Nations to its Innovation Fund
International
children’s charity UNICEF has announced that it will formally support a
total of six new blockchain startups through the UNICEF Innovation
Fund. As part of the programme, the firms will each receive a share of
$100,000 in funding.
Most of the blockchain startups selected for membership in the fund are
from a different developing nation. The ideas incubated in them will
hopefully go on to increase efficiency and transparency in a variety of
industries across the globe in those countries that need it most.
The children’s charity division of the United Nations, UNICEF, clearly
sees great promise for blockchain technology to overhaul whole
industries, particularly those traditionally rife with fraud and
corruption. Its Innovation Fund has already targeted firms specialising
in other emerging technological sectors such as data scince, machine
learning, virtual reality, and drone technology. The six startups from
the blockchain industry will join another 20 fledgling companies from
these disparate fields in receipt of funding.
The six companies named in a report by RTT News are: Argentinian
enterprise-grade funding platform Atix Labs; Mexico’s Onesmart, which
hopes to reduce corruption in emerging markets; medical records
management platform Prescrypto (also based in Mexico); the Indian
vaccination supply chain system provider Statwig; Utopixar from Tunisia,
which is exploring blockchain’s application in community governance;
and the W3 Engineers in Bangladesh. This final startup seeks to provide
connectivity between economic migrants and refugees without the use of
either internet and cellular phone technology.
Along with funding, the startups in the UNICEF Innovation Fund will also
receive assistance with developing the projects themselves, along with
guidance on growing the businesses.
Over the last year or so, UNICEF has been keen to explore how blockchain
technology and cryptocurrencies can benefit charitable causes. NewsBTC
has previously reported on the children’s charity’s effort to inspire
video gamers to use their surplus hardware to mine digital assets to
donate to charity.
Game Chaingers was launched at the start of this year and is raising
money for those in need in war torn Syria. The system makes it as easy
as possible for gamers to turn their unused processing power into
donations to the charity.
A similar tactic was repeated by the charity later this year too. This
time, UNICEF Australia launched an initiative called The Hopepage. This
simple website allows visitors to donate as much of their own spare
processing power as they like to mining the privacy-focused
cryptocurrency Monero. The decision was made to mine Monero since it can
still be profitably mined using the graphics processing units found in
many normal computers today.
December 11, 2018 by Rick D.
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