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1 bitcoin = $182
Market Cap = $2 billion
October 21st 2018
1 bitcoin = $6,544
Market Cap = $113 billion
The Only Way to Freedom is Through Its Practice Here and Now
Every single transaction that takes place outside the nexus of state control is a victory for those individuals taking part in the transaction
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The Experiment
I think that at least as far as the US government goes, it’s going to be pretty tolerant of bitcoin for a while. Of course in bitcoin time a while isn’t that long, maybe the 1-5 year horizon I think they’ll be pretty accommodative, primarily because they don’t want to be seen as squashing a brand new technology when the economy isn’t very good and when there are obvious benefits to using this system.
But then I fully suspect after that as bitcoin gets strong enough and stabilizes, which it will, people will start preferring to use it instead of dollars, and that’s a very scary proposition to an organization whose power comes in large part from it’s ability to control and manage and create the money that not only it’s own country uses, but around the world the reserve currency.
And as they realize that, whenever it is, they’re going to come down hard and everyone in bitcoin should probably be aware that that’s likely and that’s just going to be part of the experiment to see what happens when that occurs
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Things Only Grow This Fast When Something Important is Happening
When Jeff Bezo’s was asked why he founded Amazon he said that he was working on Wall Street in the early 1990s when someone showed him how fast the internet was growing he knew that something very important was happening. Otherwise you just don’t get growth like that.
The number of internet hosts grew 10x from 1989 to 1993 – that’s roughly 2x a year. Bezos founded Amazon in 1994
bitcoin adoption is growing faster than that – 3x (unique addresses used per day) to 685x (network hash rate) depending on which measure you choose
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Price
There is not a neuron in my brain that believes the price in 5 years time is going to be as ridiculously low as it is now ($327). I’m all euphoria at this moment, seriously.
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Market Cap
bitcoin’s market cap currently stands at $4.2 billion. For bitcoin to become the world’s largest currency, which it will, this needs to grow into the trillions.
bitcoin is currently , ahead of the Icelandic Kroner and the Sri Lankan Rupee. Within the next couple of years I expect to see bitcoin break through $100 billion and overtake many other national government’s currencies.
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“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”
There is absolutely no question in my mind that the world of financial geopolitics changed on that morning in January 2009 and that change is going to ripple out through history over the next 20 years. It is going to rock the foundations of the world. –
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The story of bitcoin itself is instructive. None of the “big players” had the capacity to invent it. They are NOT the big players anymore. The big players are the little developers. The anonymous. The adventurous. The big don’t know what’s happening; follow them into the ditch.
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Wikileaks
My deepest thanks to the US government, Senator McCain and Senator Lieberman for pushing Visa, MasterCard, Payal, AmEx, Mooneybookers, et al, into erecting an illegal banking blockade against Wikileaks starting in 2010.
It caused us to invest in bitcoin — with > 50000% return.
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MINING
Hash Rate Concerns
Every few weeks, someone involved in bitcoin writes the following somewhat breathless blog post:
1) Block rewards account for almost all mining rewards
2) Block rewards are going to drop (next drop in 2016/2017) and drop by 50% every four years forever
3) There won’t be enough rewards for miners leading to insufficient hashing power
4) Therefore either (a) bitcoin is in trouble (anti-bitcoin camp) or (b) block rewards / inflation will have to be increased to keep miners incented (pro-bitcoin camp)
Points 1 and 2 are true.
Points 3 and 4 are an exercise in ignoring all data that you can’t model, like the old cliche of the drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost because that is the only place he can see…
Things to ask the author when you read the inevitable Concerned-About-Hashing-Rate-In-The-Future-But-Sanguine-About-Hashing-Rate-In-The-Present Blog Post:
1) What is your assumption for BTC price at the time of the block reward drop? Also, in the long-future (2020s before it drops again!), what are your assumptions about transaction volume and fees?
2) Isn’t it a bit odd to be predicting that BTC price certainly won’t double at least once every 4 years (particularly since reduced block rewards mean fewer BTC to market)?
3) How does your model account for the last 2 years? The block reward in $ terms swung 10x over the last couple of years during the price run up/down. During that period, hashing rate has gone consistently up (see chart above) Why would a crisis emerge with a 2x swing in block rewards when it did not with a 10x shift in block rewards?
It is hard to imagine too many cases where bitcoin is a big success and either BTC price doesn’t go up or transaction volume doesn’t go up.
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The Exahash Era
Hashrate cracked the 1 Exahash benchmark (2.5x power increase since August 2015!)
This is the first time in history that the hashrate has crossed the one quintillion or exahash per second benchmark.
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New All Time High as bitcoin Hashrate Crosses 2 Exahash/s
bitcoin is practically the only production system running at exa-<anything> scale. …the power of well-aligned incentives.
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CRYPTO ASSETS
Market Cap = $212 billion
CryptoNote Technology
CryptoNote is an open-source technology that allows the creation of supposedly anonymous cryptocurrencies.
CryptoNote currency :
Bytecoin $8,201,000
Monero $4,4270,000
Boolberry $470,000
duckNote $67,000
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Ether
Future of capital allocation: Ethereum raises $750,000 in 2 hours from private parties all over the world –
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Almost $5 milllion raised in the first 5 days
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Monero
A few anonymous coins emerged this year, but have so far failed to gain traction. is one of the more interesting ones.
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The Dominant Anonymous Coin
In looking to find a few coins that were potentially useful and not scams.
Here’s how the coins I analyzed on May 27th 2014 have performed since:
Monero
May 27th 2014: Market Cap = $2.2mill
July 1st 2016: Market Cap = $19mill
+764%
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Monero was forked from Bytecoin. Unlike most CryptoNote coins it was not premined.
Monero is a slightly inflationary currency (below 1%, eventually settling at 0.37%). This is low enough to not be a major concern (and the rate of loss of the currency will probably offset the slight inflation)
Technical innovations include , which allows for Greg Maxwell’s Confidential Transactions scheme to work with Monero’s ring signatures, effectively hiding all amounts in Monero transactions.
Monero has many flaws and limitations compared to bitcoin like lack of network effect and relative security disadvantages. However, it is the number 1 ranked legitimate anonymous coin in the world.
Monero is a worthy small addition as the most advanced privacy altcoin.
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Darknet Markets and the Shadow Economy
The shadow economy is so large governments are pushing for a digital cashless society so they can track, tax, and control it on their databases.
In , Andreas Antonopoulos describes the danger of governments completing this transition over the next decade and managing to stamp out the shadow economy.
A private, fungible, p2p, digital currency is needed to prevent this totalitarian scenario occurring.
Underground and darknet market use of Monero has a good chance of increasing as government persecution of “non-compliant” cryptocurrency currency users intensifies with blacklists of “tainted” coins and more scrutiny at centralized fiat-crypto exchanges leading to tax inspections.
Very few things are as powerful in regards to brand and adoption than “Monero’s privacy and fungibility are good enough for criminals, so they’re good enough for you”.
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Rob Wainwright, former Executive Director of Europol, also expects the underground economy will shift more and more to privacy coins. Earlier this year, “We’ll see a progressive shift in 2018 towards criminal use of cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin, making it generally more challenging for law enforcement to counter”.
This makes Monero a compelling investment as the leading privacy coin and potentially the dominant darknet market currency in the years ahead.
Overall, Darknet Markets should have a bright future if they can evolve into something that successfully integrates the following features:
Decentralized marketplaces like OpenBazaar
Private cryptocurrencies like Monero
Strong encryption like PGP/Bitmessage
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MARKETS
Crypto Based IPOs
Last year there were a dozen crowd-sale pseudo-IPOs for the SEC to worry about. This year, hundreds. In a decade tens of thousands. Ooops.
SEC will quickly find itself chasing a Hydra of crypto based IPOs. Eventually SEC will have to accept disintermediation and globalization. It’s a new world and there are now 7.5 billion “accredited investors” whether the regulators like it or not. The old rules become irrelevant
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ICOs vs. Venture Funding
In June, ICOs raised $450 million, which surpasses the amount raised by early-stage venture capital funding.
The same thing happened again in July. The total raised this year from ICOs is an astonishing $1.5 billion.
Nothing provides as much connection between entrepreneurs and funding as a real free market. But it has been a long time since the financial markets have been free. ICOs represent an attempt to fix the problem.
No one knows for sure where it is all headed but this much we do know: there is no going back.
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The ICO Bubble
After the ICO bubble blows up in dramatic fashion it’ll be the best buying opportunity since the dot-com bust. Ico’s today 99% are crap.
Tyler Crypto: Bag the 1%. i.e. dotcom gave us google and amazon.
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COMPANIES / PROJECTS / PRODUCTS
Youtube Auto-Generates Subtitles for 1 Billion+ Videos at Near Human Error Rate
Key to the success of this endeavor was improving our speech recognition, machine learning algorithms, and expanding our training data.
All together, those technological efforts have resulted in a 50 percent leap in accuracy for automatic captions in English, which is getting us closer and closer to human transcription error rates.
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SpaceX Makes History with Reused Rocket Launch
Incredibly proud of the SpaceX team for achieving this milestone in space! Next goal is reflight within 24 hours.
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The launch was not only a historic first, but the culmination of 15 years of work and $1 billion of investment in rocket reusability in an effort to get rockets, today largely disposable, to work more like planes by flying 10 and eventually 100 times apiece.
“Reusable rockets are real!” tweeted Bobby Braun, a former NASA official who is now dean of the engineering school at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He compared the rocket to the first successful commercial airliner, the Boeing 707, which ushered in the jet age.
“At this point I’m highly confident that it’s possible to achieve at least 100-fold reduction in the cost of space access,” Musk said after the demonstration.
Reusability has been at the center of SpaceX’s work ever since Musk set out to reduce the cost of space travel. “Rapid and complete reusability of rockets is really the key to opening up space and becoming a space-faring civilization.”
And he means rapid: SpaceX’s new goal is to begin reusing rockets within 24 hours of landing, with just an inspection and a re-fuel.
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SpaceX
It’s starting to feel kinda normal to reuse rockets.
Good. That’s how it is for cars & airplanes and how it should be for rockets.
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SpaceX Reusable Rockets
Customers have accepted “flight-proven” first stages much faster than I expected. About half of our launches this year will be on reused first stages.
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KNOWLEDGE
The reach of human knowledge is unlimited. We are completely central to any understanding of the universe. The Scientific Revolution was an event that changed the universe (or so we should hope).
Base metals can be transmuted into gold by stars, and by intelligent beings who understand the processes that power stars, but by nothing else in the universe.
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The Four Best Books
The four best books are and by David Detusch, and and by Ayn Rand.
Everyone should learn this stuff, but currently only a handful of people in the world know much about all four of these books. This material is life-changing because it deals with broad ideas which are important to most of life, and which challenge many things people currently think they know.
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THE ASCENT OF MAN
Quantum Computers
A small quantum computer could perform more computations simultaneously than could be performed by the entire visible universe if it was all made into classical computers. In fact when I say “more” that’s an understatement. It’s exponentially more.
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Life Extension: Predicting the Order of Arrival of the First Rejuvenation Therapies
The first rejuvenation therapies to work well enough to merit the name : that aging is at root caused by a few classes of , and biotechnologies that either repair that damage or render it irrelevant will as a result produce rejuvenation.
Until very recently, no medical technology could achieve this goal, and few research groups were even aiming for that outcome.
We are in the midst of a grand transition, however, in which the research and development community is finally turning its attention to the causes of aging, understanding that this is the only way to effectively treat and cure age-related disease.
The therapies of the future will be very different from the therapies of the past. The full rejuvenation toolkit of the next few decades will consist of a range of different treatments, each targeting a different type of molecular damage in cells and tissues.
Below is the likely order of arrival of some of these therapies, based on what is presently going on in research, funding, and for-profit development.
This is an update to , now become somewhat dated given recent advances in the field. Circumstances change, and considerable progress has been made in some lines of research and development.
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1) Clearance of Senescent Cells
The most likely therapy to arrive first.
2) Immune System Destruction and Restoration
There are a number of approaches very close to practical realization
3) Clearance of the First Few Types of Amyloid
These types of rejuvenation therapy already exist in the sense of prototypes and trial treatments. Likely to soon be available via medical tourism.
4) Clearance of Glucosepane Cross-Links
Four years ago, the situation for glucosepane clearance looked pretty bleak. Now the road is open to anyone who wants to try their hand at drug discovery. That is now , among others, and I’d hope to see the first potential drug candidates emerge at some point in the next couple of years.
5) Thymic Rejuvenation to Increase the Supply of Immune Cells
This is one of a number of regenerative approaches that is on the verge, just waiting for someone to start a company or join the final two dots together and get moving.
6) Mitochondrial Repair
Halfway there is probably a target reached by 2020 or so at the present pace.
7) A Robust Cure for Cancer
We’ve all been educated to think of cancer as the greatest challenge for medical science, the problem to be solved last of all.
Nonetheless, a more rapid arrival of a generally applicable cure for cancer looks to be the likely course of events, as the basis for a treatment that can in principle put a halt to all cancer at all stages of development is currently in the earliest stages of development.
8) Reversing Stem Cell Aging
This seems at the present time like a long-term prospect, despite the high levels of funding for this line of medical research and development.
9) Clearance of Other Amyloids, Aggregates, and Sundry Lysosomal Garbage
There is a huge amount of work to accomplish because there are many targets to address, and with few exceptions, such as amyloid-β, it is unclear which of the targets are the most important.
They will all have to be addressed, in some order, but there are only so many researchers and only so much funding.
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Removing Senescent Cells Beneficial in Yet Another Experiment
Groundbreaking publication in the scientific journal “Cell” shows how a modified FOXO4 peptide has reversed many aspects of aging in old mice.
The result is important, and the “DRI” technology used to do it is potentially even more important because it is so broadly applicable.
We’ve known for a while that the elimination of senescent cells is a major plank of rejuvenation, and this is a further confirmation, with the advantage that it is underpinned by good scientific understanding of the mechanism.
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A drug that can reverse aspects of aging has been successfully trialled in animals, say scientists. They have rejuvenated old mice to restore their stamina, coat of fur and even some organ function.
The team at Erasmus University Medical Center, in the Netherlands, are planning human trials for what they hope is a treatment for old age.
The approach works by flushing out retired or “senescent” cells in the body that have stopped dividing. They accumulate naturally with age and have a role in wound healing and stopping tumours.
But while they appear to just sit there, senescent cells release chemicals that cause inflammation and have been implicated in ageing.
The group of scientists created a drug that selectively killed senescent cells by disrupting the chemical balance within them. The findings, showed liver function was easily restored and the animals doubled the distance they would run in a wheel.
Dr de Keizer said: “We weren’t planning to look at their hair, but it was too obvious to miss.”
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Life Extension: The Next Twenty Years Will Bring Numerous Opportunities to Benefit
Five years from now, it will be possible to fly to an overseas clinic and undergo a treatment that will clear out between a quarter and half of the senescent cells in your body.
That will to some degree , , reduce inflammation, , and in addition improve many other measures of health that are impacted by the normal progression of aging.
In short you will walk away , literally: one of the will be turned back for some years, perhaps decades, however long it takes for the removed senescent cells to emerge once again.
Given the present cost of , varying from a few dozen to a few thousand dollars per dose depending on whether or not they are at present mass manufactured, I think that the likely initial cost of treatment five years from now will be somewhere in the $5,000 to $25,000 range.
Higher would seem unlikely, given that this is a competitive area of development already, and lower will probably have to wait for bigger players to enter the game in regulated markets. That cost will then fall as availability spreads.
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Since 1997 Humanity Has Had a Continuous Robotic Presence on Mars
For 20 years, not a single day has gone by that we have not had a craft on the ground or in orbit studying Mars and leading the way to human exploration.
The number of ground and orbitals missions studying the planet is going to increase.
In May 2018, NASA will launch (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) to investigate the interior of Mars.
2020 is set to be a busy year for Mars missions. China, Japan, and the United Arab Emirates are all aiming for their first successful Mars mission. Following on from the success of Curiosity, the USA will launch their , while the European Space Agency will ramp up their ExoMars program. India are also going to build on their success with a second, more advanced Mangalyaan mission.
If all goes to plan, humans won’t be far behind.
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Cosmological Economics
“Too many people” with a “civilisation hurtling out of control on a planet with finite resources”?
No, all of that is wrong:
Yes, the worst can always happen. The response is: try to solve problems & make progress as fast as possible by growing… else try avoiding problems & reduce growth because *it* is a problem.
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