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Authors: (1) Maria Rigaki, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic and maria.rigaki@fel.cvut.cz; (2) Sebastian Garcia, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic and sebastian.garcia@agents.fel.cvut.cz. Table of Links Abstract & Introduction Threat Model Background and Related Work Methodology Experiments Setup Results Discussion Conclusion, Acknowledgments, and References Appendix 8 Conclusions By employing model-based reinforcement learning, MEME generates adversarial malware samples that successfully evade antivirus systems and train a surrogate model mimicking the target classifier accurately. Our experiments show that MEME surpasses existing methods in evasion rate, suggesting its potential for various applications, such as testing model robustness and enhancing cyber security against advanced persistent threats. Future work may involve exploring ensemble surrogates and other optimizations to enhance MEME’s performance further. Acknowledgments The authors acknowledge support from the Strategic Support for the Development of Security Research in the Czech Republic 2019–2025 (IMPAKT 1) program, by the Ministry of the Interior of the Czech Republic under No. VJ02010020 – AI-Dojo: Multi-agent testbed for the research and testing of AI-driven cyber security technologies. The authors acknowledge the support of NVIDIA Corporation with the donation of a Titan V GPU used for this research. References 1. Akiba, T., Sano, S., Yanase, T., Ohta, T., Koyama, M.: Optuna: A Next-generation Hyperparameter Optimization Framework. In: Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining. pp. 2623–2631. KDD ’19, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA (Jul 2019). https://doi.org/10.1145/3292500.3330701 2. 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Enhancing Cybersecurity with MEME: Reinforcement Learning for Adversarial Malware Evasion

This paper is under CC 4.0 license. available on arxiv Authors: (1) Shreyash Mishra has an equal contribution from IIIT Sri City, India; (2) S Suryavardan has an equal contribution from IIIT Sri City, India; (3) Megha Chakraborty, University of South Carolina, USA; (4) Parth Patwa, UCLA, USA; (5) Anku Rani, University of South Carolina, USA; (6) Aman Chadha, work does not relate to a position at Amazon from Stanford University, USA, or Amazon AI, USA; (7) Aishwarya Reganti, CMU, USA; (8) Amitava Das, University of South Carolina, USA; (9) Amit Sheth, University of South Carolina, USA; (10) Manoj Chinnakotla, Microsoft, USA; (11) Asif Ekbal, IIT Patna, India; (12) Srijan Kumar, Georgia Tech, USA. Table of Links Abstract & Introduction Related Work Task Details Participating systems Results Conclusion and Future Work and References 6. Conclusion and Future Work In this paper, we summarize the approaches used by the participants for the Memotion 3 task and analyze the results. Due to the multi-modal nature of the dataset, all teams use a pre-trained image and text embedding models. However, each team presents a novel model pipeline. The highest scores achieved in Task A, Task B and Task C of Memotion 3.0 are 34.41%, 79.77% and 59.82% respectively, which shows there is significant room for improvement. On analysis of the results and the mis-classified examples on the test set, we find that "Sarcasm" and "Humour" are difficult to identify, especially in code-mixed memes. While we address Hind-English code-mixed memes in this paper, future work could include exploring other languages/language pairs. A unified baseline model to analyze memes in multiple languages could also be an interesting possibility. References [1] R. Dawkins, The selfish gene, Granada Publishing Lim, 1979. [2] A. Marwick, Memes, Contexts 12 (2013) 12–13. [3] N. Akhther, Internet memes as form of cultural discourse: A rhetorical analysis on facebook, 2018. doi:10.31234/osf.io/sx6t7. [4] S. 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Nguyen, N. T. Pham, N. D. Nguyen, et al., Hcilab at memotion 2.0 2022: Analysis of sentiment, emotion and intensity of emotion classes from meme images using single and multi modalities, in: Proceedings of De-Factify: Workshop on Multimodal Fact Checking and Hate Speech Detection, 2022. [65] G. G. Lee, M. Shen, Amazon pars at memotion 2.0 2022: Multi-modal multi-task learning for memotion 2.0 challenge, Proceedings of De-Factify: Workshop on Multimodal Fact Checking and Hate Speech Detection (2020). [66] M. Bhange, N. Kasliwal, Hinglishnlp: Fine-tuned language models for hinglish sentiment detection, arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.09820 (2020). [67] A. Dosovitskiy, L. Beyer, A. Kolesnikov, et al., An image is worth 16x16 words: Transformers for image recognition at scale, arXiv:2010.11929 (2020). [68] W. Yu, D. Kolossa, wentaorub at Memotion 3: Ensemble learning for multi-modal meme classification, in: Proceedings of De-Factify 2: Workshop on Multimodal Fact Checking and Hate Speech Detection, CEUR, 2023. [69] A. Radford, J. W. Kim, C. Hallacy, A. Ramesh, et al., Learning transferable visual models from natural language supervision, in: ICML, 2021. [70] X. Li, X. Yin, C. Li, P. Zhang, et al., Oscar: Object-semantics aligned pre-training for vision-language tasks, 2020. arXiv:2004.06165. [71] Y.-C. Tang, K.-D. Wang, T.-Y. Ou, W.-C. Peng, NYCU_TWO at Memotion 3: Good foundation, good teacher, then you have good meme analysis, in: Proceedings of De-Factify 2: Workshop on Multimodal Fact Checking and Hate Speech Detection, CEUR, 2023. [72] Z. Liu, Y. Lin, Y. Cao, H. Hu, Y. Wei, Z. Zhang, S. Lin, B. Guo, Swin transformer: Hierarchical vision transformer using shifted windows, 2021. arXiv:2103.14030. [73] X. Guo, J. Ma, A. Zubiaga, NUAA-QMUL-AIIT at Memotion 3: Multi-modal fusion with squeeze-and-excitation for internet meme emotion analysis, in: Proceedings of De-Factify 2: Workshop on Multimodal Fact Checking and Hate Speech Detection, CEUR, 2023. [74] Y. Liu, M. Ott, N. Goyal, J. Du, M. Joshi, D. Chen, O. Levy, M. Lewis, L. Zettlemoyer, V. Stoyanov, Roberta: A robustly optimized bert pretraining approach (2019). [75] X. Zhai, J. Puigcerver, A. Kolesnikov, et al., A large-scale study of representation learning with the visual task adaptation benchmark, 2020. arXiv:1910.04867. [76] G. Ke, Q. Meng, T. Finley, et al., Lightgbm: A highly efficient gradient boosting decision tree, in: Neurips, 2017. [77] K. He, X. Zhang, S. Ren, J. Sun, Deep residual learning for image recognition, in: CVPR, 2016. [78] F. Schroff, D. Kalenichenko, J. Philbin, FaceNet: A unified embedding for face recognition and clustering, in: CVPR, 2015.

Overview of Memotion 3: Sentiment & Emotion
Analysis of Codemixed Hinglish - Conclusion

Authors: (1) Maggie D. Bailey, Colorado School of Mines and National Renewable Energy Lab; (2) Douglas Nychka, Colorado School of Mines; (3) Manajit Sengupta, National Renewable Energy Lab; (4) Aron Habte, National Renewable Energy Lab; (5) Yu Xie, National Renewable Energy Lab; (6) Soutir Bandyopadhyay, Colorado School of Mines. Table of Links Abstract and Intro Data Bayesian Hierarchical Model (BHM) Solar Radiation Example Results Conclusion Appendix A: Simulation Study Appendix B: Regridding Coefficient Estimates References References Accadia, C., Mariani, S., Casaioli, M., Lavagnini, A., and Speranza, A.: Sensitivity of precipitation forecast skill scores to bilinear interpolation and a simple nearest-neighbor average method on high-resolution verification grids, Weather and forecasting, 18, 918–932, 2003. Berndt, C. and Haberlandt, U.: Spatial interpolation of climate variables in Northern Germany—Influence of temporal resolution and network density, Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies, 15, 184–202, 2018. Chandler, R., Barnes, C., Brierley, C., and Alegre, R.: Regridding and interpolation of climate data for impacts modelling–some cautionary notes, Tech. rep., Copernicus Meetings, 2022. Cressie, N. and Wikle, C. K.: Statistics for Spatio-Temporal Data, 2011. Cressie, N. A.: Change of support and the modifiable areal unit problem, 1996. Diaconescu, E. P., Gachon, P., and Laprise, R.: On the remapping procedure of daily precipitation statistics and indices used in regional climate model evaluation, Journal of Hydrometeorology, 16, 2301–2310, 2015. Ensor, L. A. and Robeson, S. M.: Statistical characteristics of daily precipitation: comparisons of gridded and point datasets, Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, 47, 2468–2476, 2008. Finley, A. O., Banerjee, S., and Gelfand, A. E.: spBayes for large univariate and multivariate point-referenced spatio-temporal data models, arXiv preprint arXiv:1310.8192, 2013. Gelfand, A. E., Zhu, L., and Carlin, B. P.: On the change of support problem for spatio-temporal data, Biostatistics, 2, 31–45, 2001. Handcock, M. S. and Stein, M. L.: A Bayesian analysis of kriging, Technometrics, 35, 403–410, 1993. Harris, T., Li, B., and Sriver, R.: Multi-model Ensemble Analysis with Neural Network Gaussian Processes, arXiv [preprint] arXiv:2202.04152, 2022. Loghmari, I., Timoumi, Y., and Messadi, A.: Performance comparison of two global solar radiation models for spatial interpolation purposes, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 82, 837–844, 2018. McGinnis, S. and Mearns, L.: Building a climate service for North America based on the NA-CORDEX data archive, Climate Services, 22, 100 233, 2021. McGinnis, S., Mearns, L., and McDaniel, L.: Effects of Spatial Interpolation Algorithm Choice on Regional Climate Model Data Analysis, "Fall Meeting, American Geophysical Union, San Francisco", 2010. Phillips, D. L. and Marks, D. G.: Spatial uncertainty analysis: propagation of interpolation errors in spatially distributed models, Ecological Modelling, 91, 213–229, 1996. Rajulapati, C. R., Papalexiou, S. M., Clark, M. P., and Pomeroy, J. W.: The perils of regridding: examples using a global precipitation dataset, Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, 60, 1561–1573, 2021. Rauscher, S. A., Coppola, E., Piani, C., and Giorgi, F.: Resolution effects on regional climate model simulations of seasonal precipitation over Europe, Climate dynamics, 35, 685–711, 2010. Sengupta, M., Xie, Y., Lopez, A., Habte, A., Maclaurin, G., and Shelby, J.: The national solar radiation data base (NSRDB), Renewable and sustainable energy reviews, 89, 51–60, 2018. Whittemore, A. S.: Errors-in-variables regression using Stein estimates, The American Statistician, 43, 226–228, 1989. This paper is under CC 4.0 license. available on arxiv

Regridding Uncertainty for Statistical Downscaling of Solar Radiation: References

This Museum Was Built on Native American Burial Mounds: What to Know About the Dickson Mounds Museum

founder and CEO Jim Blasko is the Bitcoin OG who recently discovered the original upload of Bitcoin’s code base, a historical document containing Satoshi Nakamoto’s personal notations. Dating back to 2009 when Bitcoin was invented, the 13-year-old file, previously thought to be lost forever, provides valuable insight into Bitcoin’s early development. Aspire Jim was recently quoted by Cointelegraph and Bitcoin.com as describing his discovery as the "cleanest original version of Bitcoin." He recalled that Hal Finley, the first Bitcoin recipient in history, intended to mail this particular version to some people before his death in 2014. In this exclusive interview, sat down with him to learn more about Bitcoin’s early days and his astonishing discovery of Bitcoin’s v0.1 codebase. Olayimika Oyebanji (The Original Bitcoin code base discovered by Jim Blasko) 1. You are one of the early miners of Bitcoin in history. Can you tell us a little bit of the story behind your early involvement in Bitcoin? I got into Bitcoin mining in 2010 when Dave Kleimen, a cryptography friend of mine from Florida, knew I was doing hard-rock mining in the Nevada desert as a hobby. He told me “he was mining digital gold” and that sounded interesting. I trusted Dave but was cautious enough not to trust the Bitcoin.exe software which seemed like a Trojan horse. I had no reason not to trust him. Many years earlier(around 1999)Dave and I played around with an old hacking program called Sub7. So, I started mining Bitcoin on a cheap laptop for the safety of my networks, knowing there was nothing on the machine. I was nervous enough that I would remove the network connection to my main pc — in case my suspicion was correct and Bitcoin was anything else. Bitcoin would make the laptop run to the point of melting CPU processors, warping batteries packs and the entire body of the laptop including hard drives. Overclocking GPUs to mine Bitcoin with early mining software also had a similar effect. Roasted silicon was the smell of a burnt laptop, and it is just a terrible smell. I didn’t think about it at the time, but until I started backing up my wallets I had burned millions upon millions of dollars (not to be realized for many years). I laugh now but that fact made me twitch in the past. 2. How did you feel when you mined your first Bitcoin in 2010? The fact that Bitcoin.exe actually worked was a good feeling. But the downside was that I kept needing cheap laptops to burn. Soon, I started bugging people for their old desktops and I would dissect them into milk crates with box fans for cooling, essentially building the first homebrew mining rigs. It was not more of a big deal at the time, we didn’t know it would attract so many so fast. The dark web stuff that came later from Ross Ulbricht had a lot to do with early adoption but I wasn’t into the stuff he was doing. I’m a collector of many sorts and Bitcoin was just another collection for me at the time. Some miners thought that Bitcoin’s code was broken because they got the 50 BTC plus the TX fees. It was fun to see people scramble in a race to learn more about Bitcoin in the early days. The race to mine Bitcoin faster was interesting as well. ASIC eventually won, so I’ve kept all the ASIC miners I received including an early antminer prototype directly from Bitmain. Eventually, it wasn’t reasonable to mine BTC anymore because the cost of buying BTC is always cheaper than the cost to mine it unless you go mega-scale mining with giant farms. 3. What does Bitcoin Pizza Day mean to you? I order pizza weekly. It is my favorite food. So I’m glad its now recognized as the official food sponsor of Bitcoin! Lazlo was part of Bitcoin well before he made the 1st Bitcoin purchase of 10,000 BTC for two PapaJohn pizzas. People confuse this as the first transaction on Bitcoin but that came much earlier when Satoshi sent 10 BTC to Hal Finnley. What Laz did was make the first purchase using Bitcoin. My first purchase was much smaller but it would be my Lamborghini Hurrican for 40 BTC in 2017. I bought the first Lambo with Bitcoin directly, meaning I didn’t sell BTC for cash. Lamborghini of Newport Beach took the BTC directly for the brand new car. I turned that “WhenLambo ‘’ meme into a legitimate reality for Bitcoiners everywhere. Laz’s Tx gave Bitcoin a starting value, my Tx gave Bitcoin its bling. 4. Does Bitcoin represent a new phase in the evolution of human civilization? If yes, how so? Obviously, this is a YES. You can do anything with Crypto now, and it’s borderless. Now that it is seeing mainstream acceptance things are really going to change. Governments will soon all use cryptocurrency as their main fiat. The use of paper money will be completely gone in under 20 years and will only be traded by collectors much like baseball cards and vintage coins. Keep in mind it’s not all about Bitcoin anymore. Many other projects are changing the way we look at crypto. Ethereum for one of course, and my friend Charles and his Cardano project look good. The project I head is called Aspire and it has grown well in its first 2 years. These projects take time to grow but with dedicated teams and good features its inevitably going to happen. 5. What does Bitcoin’s codebase represent? Can you offer a simple explanation of how you rediscovered it? It means we can look through the original Bitcoin code that was uploaded the same year Bitcoin was released. It’s the oldest uploaded version in the hands of the public dating to August of 2009 and uploaded by Sirius. We know Martii Malmi to be sirius and also the 4th user on Satoshi’s forum Bitcointalk.org. Satoshi would credit Martii as a developer in in his early releases. I discovered the code on Sourceforge, where it was known to be but had been removed and scrapped from the search engines back in 2012. I was able to rediscover it with a small browser hack pretty quickly. It’s not searchable on the site, but it’s been there since 2009. 6. Why should we care about it? If you are interested in the history of Bitcoin and the group that made up Satoshi Nakamoto, then it is a fun discovery. We know Bitcoin’s code is altered as time goes on, but this is the earliest upload out there with origin notations and comments from Satoshi. Inside this release we find SN explaining how actual Bitcoin functions work in deeper detail than that of the whitepaper. I’ve seen the claimed 2008 code releases but they weren’t uploaded until 2013 and they remain as questionable in the community as they contained features not released in Bitcoin. 7. A popular crypto website described you as a sleuth. I find this to be quite revealing. Can you tell us how long you have been searching for Bitcoin’s original code base? I’m curious by nature and I enjoy hunting for treasure in many forms. I wear my 2600 shirts proudly and I’ve been part of the computer space since I got my first Tandy 1000 in 1987. I’m one of the FreeKevin guys lol. Kevin Mitnick actually lives near me these days however we’ve yet to meet in person. I didn’t search long. It took me about 10 minutes to find this code. When I found it, I was pretty surprised that it had not been found or documented so I made an announcement on Facebook which turned into viral Bitcoin news. 8. Does Bitcoin or decentralization have a future? It has a past, a present, and we learn from that for the future. Bitcoin is the most decentralized cryptocurrency at the moment and moving into the future this will likely continue. The miners choose Bitcoin’s path, not a single identity making claims or pushing updates. As a developer in our community, decentralization is something we all work towards with security in mind. Most blockchains are centralized by a single authority simply because that is how they start until they can move on without their creator. Even Ethereum suffers from this and will continue until Vitalik walks away and leaves the project. I feel he’s probably still too young to understand that. When the time is right I will move on, but I still have work to do to get Aspire there. Maybe Vitalik feels the same way I do, but Ethereum no longer needs his oversight at this point. If he wants ETH to become truly decentralized, he will have to move on like Satoshi did, like we all have to. 9. Who is Satoshi Nakamoto ? I think Satoshi Nakamoto is now the name that represents all Bitcoiners as a collective, just like it did in the very beginning. Satoshi is the makeup of several cryptographers’ work. Hal Finney, Dave Kleiman, Martii Malmi, and Nick Szabo. You can almost toss in Dorian for the donation of his name, although that happened without his knowledge. To be clear Dorian had nothing to do with anything Bitcoin, but his namesake alone has more importance then Craig Wright and his BSV propaganda. Don’t get tricked by BSV claims. BSV is not Bitcoin. Craig Wright is NOT Satoshi. 10. Solving the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto’s existence has been about altering the Genesis block. What do you make of this? This is a complete misconception. The genesis block is block 0 and not block1. There was no reward for block zero other than spitting out the Genesis block hash. There is no way to sign or alter the genesis block. However, block 1 and up could be signed by someone who wanted to show proof they controlled an early block. For instance, any block mined previous to Jan 9th are all Satoshi’s. Signing any of them would be cryptographic proof. We all know that #Faketoshi (referring to Craig Wright) won’t be doing that To read more about Jim Blasko’s discovery: Head Here Also Published Here

The Developer Who Discovered Bitcoin's Original Codebase, Jim Blasko

Satoshi Nakamoto — the maverick inventor of Bitcoin — not only saw a pregnant future but also made us its midwives as well. He planted his genius idea in our minds and armed us with a technology whose symbolism is freedom. Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? We will never stop wondering until the Genesis block is altered! Thirteen years since the invention of Bitcoin and its underlying technology, there has been no shortage of pretenders vying for its throne. But the thesis that has been established is that it was invented by a mysterious figure with a Japanese name. Hence, the puzzle that unmasking Satoshi Nakamoto’s true identity has become remains unsolvable — for the most part. While Satoshi is largely unknown, his involvement in the early development of Bitcoin is mammoth. In point of fact, there is a semblance of facticity pointing to the whitepaper he penned, the Genesis mining of Bitcoin, Satoshi’s 50 Bitcoin rewards, Satoshi’s 980,000 mined Bitcoins, his acquaintance with Hal Finley, the first Bitcoin recipient in history, and Satoshi’s understanding of the price of fame. Today, much of what we know about the mysterious inventor of comes from the amalgamation of clues, facts, and theories. But the sad truth is that we know next to nothing about him — not even the choice of gender ascribed to his vague personality is enough to go by. Bitcoin Moreover, it is essentially in dispute whether the shadowy figure of Satoshi Nakamoto satisfies the biological requirements for the honor of being called human. But, Satoshi being a Japanese name for the masculine gender is nothing but a mere assumption to go by. What if Satoshi was an AI robot? What if our judgment of Satoshi’s gender and masculinity is dead wrong? What if he was a woman or even a trans man? And what if “Satoshi Nakamoto” is just a monicker used by a group of nerds?! Is Satoshi better Known Than Unknown? The world’s obsession with Satoshi Nakamoto continues to grow yearly matching almost the growing popularity of Bitcoin itself. In colleges where cryptocurrency will be taught in the future, a chapter dedicated to Satoshi will be taught to students who wish to learn more about how Bitcoin was invented. There would be endless questions about who he was and why he is unknown, and they will be made to realize that whoever alters the Genesis block is the real Satoshi. In a world as chaotic as ours, it is easy to imagine a couple of things that are most likely to trail the discovery of Satoshi since his name has already made him a subject of multiple interests. Although his shoes are too big for anyone to wear, his legendary status hints at various possibilities; from risking an attack on his life or that of anyone close to him, to the truckload of lawsuits waiting for him, and to the war of the press and the Establishment. The Genesis Block In solving the puzzle of Satoshi’s disappearance, the Genesis block; the first Bitcoin block, will have to be altered by Satoshi himself or whoever has the keys to it. Changing it is similar to cutting the except that whoever is able to do so will be said to have conquered the world without an army. Knot of Gordium The Genesis block is a milestone. It is the first block that was ever recorded in the history of Bitcoin; it had a reward of 50 Bitcoins which Satoshi earned after mining the first Bitcoin, and it contained a text referring to the vanity of relying on traditional banks. This block altogether marked the remarkable beginning of Bitcoin. However, it has remained inactive since Satoshi’s last correspondence with Hal Thomas Finney, the famed American computer scientist, lending credence to the fact that he was at some point involved in the early development of the Bitcoin software, and proving that he might have worked out the code before writing the Bitcoin whitepaper. There are in the genesis block 50 unspendable Bitcoins locked by Satoshi for reasons best known to him or them. And it is popularly believed that whenever he sells off his stash at once, Bitcoin would tremendously lose its value and go to zero. To date, evidence pointing to the first Bitcoin transaction has been the public address of Satoshi which currently holds the locked reward from the first mining. Most people believe that Satoshi, real or imagined, exerts a profound influence on the movement of Bitcoin. Conclusion Whether dead or alive, and whether real or fake, Satoshi‘s name has reached the ends of the earth. In theory, he is one of the wealthiest men in today’s world thanks to his precious stash. But, we may never know his true identity despite the refined computer genius that he is touted to be. Satoshi could be the mask of an entity or the true identity of a middle age man laughing at the folly of the entire world behind his computer screen, making a fool of money, or patiently waiting for the fullness of time to make all of the world’s wealthy men poor in comparison. If Bitcoin ever achieves its full potential, Satoshi Nakamoto’s statue (whatever it will look like) will be everywhere around the globe. Also published here.

The Genesis Block and The Phantom: A Story of Satoshi Nakamoto

Real-world data show lower levels of in the newer patients as compared to the clinical trials. Medication adherence is affected by a wide variety of factors, including health disparities, the nature of the disease, treatment complexities, and more. Declining levels of adversely impact patient outcomes and product performance alike. patient adherence patient adherence Research shows that medication nonadherence affects as many as 40% to 50% of patients suffering from chronic illnesses¹. Most pharma companies are focusing on and exploiting , in particular, to explore and understand the factors hindering patient adherence. data analytics pharma analytics, Using pharma analytics to study the factors affecting patient adherence Analyses of huge volumes of diverse datasets across geographies, diseases, and other factors helped in the understanding of what factors impact . Some of them include: patient adherence Financial burden The economic distress that the patient faces due to the expensive dosages of medicines can lead to missed doses or even complete medication drop-offs. This is particularly common in patients of low-income groups suffering from rare diseases like cancer which involve expensive therapies and ongoing treatment at substantial out-of-pocket costs. Patients usually do cost-benefit analyses and decide to stop the treatment owing to excessive costs. Physicians When a drug is relatively new or has poor safety profiles, it becomes difficult for physicians to work confidently with such medications. In addition, a physician’s lack of exposure to certain therapies may also affect their ability in handling patients with high-risk illnesses. Patient Analyses indicate that prolonged tests, consultations, and various therapies put a strain on the patient and result in them getting disengaged. Conditions like polypharmacy which requires patients to remember multiple medications, could gradually lead to forgetfulness, disinterest, and eventually an overall deterioration in the patient outcomes. Brand Complexities in drug administration, such as ease of intake (oral Vs intravenous) and additional instructions on the medications (crushing tablets, opening or closing capsules, etc.), also are responsible for improving patient adherence to medication. Analyses show that medication’s tolerability profile and side effects that it results in are primary factors in the patient’s decision towards medication regimens. Social Determinants of Health Insights point to the fact that social determinants play a key role in creating awareness about the immediate care and treatment available to patients. In the case of certain populations, including low-income groups, underprivileged sections of the community, elderly people, and others, there’s a lot of hardship in dealing with the complexities of the treatment procedures and undergoing continuous medication. Role of data analytics in improving patient adherence By incorporating diverse datasets ( such as claims data , EHR etc ) , patient drug fill days, and therapy durations, along with the use of predictive analytics we could pave the way for improving patient medication adherence. — An insight obtained from analytics on patient demographics can help healthcare providers plan better and also create customized intervention strategies. Understanding patient demographics — While patient adherence might be adversely affected due to the financial burden on patients, prior analysis and ascertaining appropriate cost-sharing options can prepare them and improve medication adherence. Analyzing patient copays — Using data-driven insights, the purchasing cycle for patient prescription medications can be planned well in advance to ensure smoother availability of the medications in required dosages. Arranging patient prescription supply Data analytics, including machine learning and plays a vital role in understanding the patient adherence factors and thereby taking measures towards improving them. Taking into consideration the below factors could considerably enhance patient adherence: pharma analytics, Use diverse datasets Analyses produce meaningful insights only when performed with high-quality data. Predictive analytics and machine learning techniques also yield accurate results only when superior data is used. Investing in master data management and big data capabilities can ensure richer data quality and diversity. Working with third-party vendors to gather data and using non-conventional datasets like Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics , pharmacy and medical claims , EHR etc. provides better and more reliable results. Automate your predictive analytics The traditional methods used in predictive analytics are highly time-consuming and demand a lot of expertise. Using the modern techniques of and automation capabilities in modeling proves easier and produces more accurate outcomes. machine learning in healthcare Converting outputs to strategy Extensive datasets and advanced modeling techniques will be truly useful only when used in conjunction with industry expertise. Translating the complex modeling results and statistical conclusions into an intervention strategy that helps non-data science stakeholders get a clear picture is recommended. This would, in turn, increase the shareholders’ trust and pave the way for newer dimensions. Final Thoughts plays a significant role in analyzing and interpreting the causes associated with levels. In addition, also gives actionable insights into the impact of medication adherence on sales and marketing functions. Data analytics patient adherence commercial analytics References [1] Fred Kleinsinger , ( Jul. 2018 ), The Permanente Journal The Unmet Challenge of Medication Nonadherence [2] Brody JE. New York, NY: The New York Times; 2017. The cost of not taking your medication [Internet] [3] Peterson AM, Takiya L, Finley R. Meta-analysis of interventions to improve medication adherence. 2003 Apr 1;60(7):657–65. Am J Health Syst Pharm. [4] Wu JR, Moser DK. Medication adherence mediates the relationship between heart failure symptoms and cardiac event-free survival in patients with heart failure. 2018 J Cardiovasc Nurs. [5] Kleinsinger F. Working with the noncompliant patient. 2010 Spring Perm J.

Leveraging Data Analytics to Improve Patient Adherence

Memestocks for the Masses & the Redistribution of Wall Street Wealth

Warner Bros. Games and Turtle Rock Studios today revealed new information and a new gameplay trailer for Back 4 Blood. The new video offers a great in-depth look at the world and characters for the game, along with the backstories for the game's Ridden slaying crew called The Cleaners. The upcoming spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead is due out later this October. In Back 4 Blood, players will be able to play as eight Cleaner characters: Holly, Walker, Doc, Karlee, Jim, Hoffman, Evangelo, and Mom. Some of the new Ridden variants shown in the trailer include the Breakers, the Ogres, screeching Snitchers, and the ravenous Hags. Here's a rundown of the Cleaners and their backstories, courtesy of Turtle Rock Studios: Holly – After losing her family to the Devil Worm, Holly Forrester learned to channel all her energy into being a Cleaner and is known as the glue that keeps the team together. Armed with her trusty nail spiked baseball bat she affectionately calls “Dottie,” Holly’s resilience and never-say-die attitude helps boost the team's morale and is often seen as a ray of light in the darkness of the apocalypse. Walker – The oldest of five siblings, Elijah Walker was born in Evansburgh to a hardworking, blue collar family. The former Army Ranger and war-torn veteran is highly skilled with a wealth of front-line combat experience. Walker is a man of few words, but when he speaks, he commands the attention of his fellow Cleaners, who all respect his commitment to the fight. Doc – She has been instrumental in keeping Fort Hope up and running, but this is far from the life Doc expected when she first came to America. Fiercely independent, she sacrificed social life for career. It wasn’t until years later that she finally found a kindred spirit in Mom. After the Collapse, Doc’s no-nonsense attitude and pragmatic outlook served her well. Though her bedside manner can take some getting used too, no one denies she’s one hell of a doctor and a mean shot to boot. Karlee – Surviving on the outskirts of Fort Hope since the Collapse, Karlee only trusted in herself. No one knows much about her, and she’s fine with that. Though originally seen as a nuisance at best and a looter at worst, her actions have proved time and time again which side she’s on. Now with the Ridden on the rise, she’s made the choice to fight alongside the survivors. She may not be a Cleaner by name, but she more than makes up for it in attitude. Jim – Nobody knows Finleyville and the surrounding county like Jim. From an early age, he would head out into the countryside with his father, hunting and trapping with the best of them. After a stint in the military, he returned home, only to see it ravaged by the Collapse. Now he’s found his place among the most trusted cleaners. When not fighting back-to-back with his team, he’s scouring the countryside of his beloved Pennsylvania routing out the Ridden infestation. Hoffman – A meticulous individual, enthusiastic prepper, and conspiracy theorist. When the infection hit, he and his mother hunkered down and rode out the storm as the rest of the world fell into chaos. After his mother passed away in her sleep and his supplies ran out, he left his boarded-up house to face the world of the Devil Worm. Howard Robert Hoffman is genuinely skilled and good-hearted, with an earnest desire to be a useful part of the team. As part of the Cleaners, he’s finally come across the family that he’s always wanted – he just had to wade through the zombie apocalypse to find it. Evangelo – He may be the youngest and least experienced Cleaner on the team but has proven to be a quick study. Besides being good in a fight, Evangelo has established himself as a loyal and reliable member of the team. He tends to talk a lot, especially when he’s nervous, but is eager to show that he has what it takes to be a Cleaner. Mom – The only person surprised that Mom became the voice of survivors in Finleyville was herself. She’s never shirked from a challenge and always puts the needs of others over her own. Still, for one who’s used to bucking authority, her newfound responsibility sometimes weighs uneasily on her. Although she has faith in her Cleaners, Mom has questioned other leaders’ strategies on more than one occasion, especially since the death of her son. Mom’s goal is simple, make the Ridden pay. Back 4 Blood Trailer Reveals The Cleaners and Story Details The new trailer does offer a nice overview of the characters and stakes of the world. It definitely appears the game has a bit of a tongue-in-cheek humorous style and attitude. It also offers a bit of insight into the overall story in the world of Back 4 Blood in that the game is set after an outbreak caused by an infection from a parasite called the Devil Worm. The Cleaners are the veterans of the apocalypse who are rallying to take back the world from the zombie-like horrors called the Ridden. You can check out the new 'Meet The Cleaners' trailer for Back 4 Blood below. Back 4 Blood arrives on October 12 for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, and Windows PC. Currently, players can register for the game for early beta tests at the . Gamers who pre-order the game will receive a bonus Fort Hope Elite Weapon Skin Pack. official website More in Gaming: Days Gone Director John Garvin Says Gamers Should Pay Full Price Back 4 Blood Trailer Details Unique Game Director AI & Card System The Hybrid Future of Multiplayer Game Architecture Keep up with all the latest gaming news, features, and guides. Subscribe to our newsletter in the footer below!

Back 4 Blood Trailer Introduces The Cleaners and Showcases Game Story

A few days ago marked my first year as a software engineer, or as we like to say it here, my IFTTTerversary. It’s been an amazing first year, and I thought I’d reflect on some of the important things I’ve learned as someone starting out in this industry. What has helped me be successful: An empathetic manager and team During my first few months at IFTTT, I was flustered probably 99% of the time. I was able to confide in my manager and with members of my team around my feelings of overwhelm and insecurity. Having space to voice my concerns and not being met with disinterest was huge for me. A culture of asking questions, sharing knowledge and providing feedback At we have a strong culture of knowledge sharing. The web team meets every week to discuss what we’ve been working on and present on different topics related to our stack. We often pair on tasks both in person and , and give and receive feedback on one another’s code regularly. There isn’t a lot of ego on our team that keeps us from asking questions or admitting that we may not know the best solution. That’s what makes our final product so strong. IFTTT remotely A few of the members of my incredible Web team 3. Conversations around diversity and inclusivity We have diversity and inclusion meetings monthly. We don’t shy away from difficult conversations about bias and our own shortcomings, and that helps us move forward in making IFTTT a place where employees can feel appreciated for who they are. As a woman in tech it’s important to have a place where I can voice my perspective and feel heard, as well as listen to the experiences of others. 4. A dog-friendly office The fact that IFTTT is dog-friendly is icing on the cake. My little dog Tulsi gets to come with me to work and sees our team as her extended family. Her presence is a stress release for everyone and her silly antics help make IFTTT a fun place to work. Tulsi and her friend Finley : What is still hard . You can’t know everything and that can be uncomfortable It’s great to have moments where I can bang out a feature and feel confident about it, but a lot of my job is saying I’ll get something done without being 100% certain of how I will execute it. Our backend on web is all in Ruby, which I’ve had to pick up on the job. That’s where comfort with asking questions comes in, and having a team that sees strength in asking for help. 2. Not comparing myself to others. It’s easy to look at how quickly another engineer produces work, or how easily they understand a concept and start comparing yourself against that person. This is something I still struggle with, and just acknowledging it when it comes up is powerful in dismantling its grip on my confidence. Here’s to many more happy years at IFTTT! And some more pics of our office pups, of course: From left to right: Gus, Zoe and Muffin

The first post-bootcamp year: a reflection

We dreamt to create best hackathon experience but ended up adding happy chapters to our college lives also. This the story of Hack In the North 3.0. Back in 2017, when Hack in the North 2.0 was concluded, we knew that we had set a benchmark for ourselves. Though we were one of the best and oldest student hackathon in India, we never expected the growth it had going from 1st version to 2nd. We had grown from a poorly funded college event to an event sponsored by Github itself. To recreate this, we looked back into the core mission behind Hack In the North: ”where creators meet” The creators/college students often have revolutionary ideas, but what they lack in is the spark to ignite those ideas to reality. Hence we wanted to give them a platform to realize these ideas. So now when we were clear with the motive we started looking for the basic needs required. Hack in the north 3,0 photoshoot After looking into stats for what a person attend an event for, we ended up concluding this: TL;DR Bigger Cash Prize money for winners: No Travel reimbursement: Yes Increase Goodies: Yes (Duh.) Increase the number of participants: No (Quality over quantity — this year we selected ~10% of the people who applied) Food: Obviously A Commitment: To Promote Diversity in Tech with zeal and excitement. Decisions One thing we were sure about was that money comes with previous success. So this time money wasn’t that big a problem but to decide where to spend was. Prize money( the one given in cash excluding sponsored prizes) was always modest in Hack in the North and also we never did travel reimbursement in earlier editions. We knew that even after getting more money we would only be able to choose one among the two. To decide on this, we took a look at our core mission. And as we looked at it, we realized that though a big prize money may attract more people, but it won’t relate to what we stand for. We always wanted to be a platform that will provide everything to a developer who wanted to create something. Rather than felicitating a few who win, we wanted everyone to be treated like winners. Now our hackathon was at the level where we had to decide whether to either have only monetary sponsors or associate with patrons who may perhaps give just stickers. This does not mean much empirically, but in a broader term, each sponsor increased our work a bit more. We chose to do that extra bit of work because, at the end of the day, it was all about people and nothing could be better than goodies. Though we could have fund more participants this year, but we decided to keep the number same as we wanted to focus more on the overall experience for a manageable crowd, given our logistical restraints. We had 2000+ applications from all over India this year and we tried to do our best in inviting the best out of them and ended up creating a hub of great developers from all the four directions. To promote diversity we made a 20% reservation for female developers. A special prize was also kept for best female teams. The same is done for best hardware hack also every year. Our Guide to Organising a Hackathon: TL;DR Organising a hackathon is easy. You just need simple things. A group of people who care deeply about it. Amazing Branding A hardworking Registration team And the most important, a Sponsorship team To make people get associated with the event on a personal level we decided to go with no hierarchy policy in the organizing team. We went with the decision that the group has consensys about. This made decision making longer, but made everyone feel more associated. A sophomore and a final year working together is what we imagined and succeeded in. Branding is one of the most crucial parts of any event. Everything that matters is how people look at the event. Our designer and I myself were Obsessed with Minimalism. We decided our color palette and everything done was always in that color and style only. This made work easier and much more professional. We also created a mascot for the event and named him Neo. For registrations portal, we used the amazing opensource library Quill with some modifications of our own. In order to remove bias during selection, each person was reviewed by 2 different people before getting selected. Though selection procedure took a lot of time, it paid when one of our mentors said “The best talent pool I’ve ever seen in a hackathon.” — Gaurav Dubey,CEO, ITH Technologies We are much thankful to our sponsorship team for associating amazing sponsors like consensys, ITH, Github, Topcoder, Z cash, Unity, Heroku, PSF, Gitlab, Hackster.io, RestDb, .tech domains and many more Sponsors of Hack In The North 3.0 Link and name everyone. We went from a college funded event to a 99% sponsored event in 3 years. It was a long way. And then after 6 months of preparation, the big day was finally here and we witnessed people from all over India coming together to make amazing things. Like our participants, our mentors also showed a great amount of diversity. We had Aksoka Finley(New York), Amanda Lee(Toronto), Tim(California) representing consensys, Gabriel (Israel) representing Z Cash, Gaurav Dubey from ITH, Vishnu K S and Rohhit Vashittya from Zulip. We had workshops by Unity (He brought an oculus), Consensys and Z cash The Hacks This year’s decided tracks were namely in the following tracks: AI Blockchain VR/AR Hardware Facebook post contating details about the winners To view more photos of hack in the north visit our flickr album _Edit description_www.flickr.com HackInTheNorth's albums | Flickr Thank you for reading have a nice day xD A video we made for branding Hack in the north

Hack in the North 3.0 : How we created India’s best student hackathon

One might think that the very first lucky bitcoiner is quite happy these days, but the truth is that, sadly, he left us early. Harold Thomas Finney II, better known as Hal Finney, was a talented American programmer, a remarkable , and the first person to receive Bitcoin ever, from Satoshi Nakamoto himself. He was the first one to run a Bitcoin node and the first miner (besides Satoshi), while greatly helping to spot bugs and exploits in the early days of the cryptocurrency. cypherpunk He was born in California (US) in 1956 and got an engineering bachelor's degree from the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) in 1979. He didn’t always show interest in privacy and cryptography, instead starting his career in games development. He programmed several popular games for Mattel and Atari, Adventures of Tron, Armor Ambush, Astroblast, and Space Attack. including . This was the company that owned and sold the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) software created by another cypherpunk programmer, Phil Zimmerman. The open version of PGP is now the most widely used email encryption standard. Finney would stay working with them until his forced retirement in 2011, due to his Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) showing symptoms — the same rare disease the famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking suffered from. He would later shift to privacy developments, being one of the first hires in the PGP Corporation, founded in 2002 considered Besides this career path, Finney was a dedicated cypherpunk and, along with Eric Hughes, helped to create and run the first anonymous remailer. This is a service that deletes the identifying information in emails. Then, in 2004, he would release another development very close to Bitcoin. Reusable Proof-of-Work (RPOW) In 1997, (another cypherpunk) created one of the first versions of a Proof-of-Work (PoW) system, called Hashcash. It was designed to avoid email spam by offering a small “work token” to every message. Finney was inspired by it to create its own PoW system, called Reusable Proof-of-Work ( ). Adam Back RPOW While both systems utilize Proof of Work tokens, RPOW introduced the notion of creating RSA-signed tokens in exchange for Hashcash tokens. This stands in contrast to Hashcash, where each token could only be used once before becoming invalid. These RPOW tokens could then be transferred between users and exchanged for new RPOWs at each transaction, effectively enabling reuse. In other words, RPOW could be used to create digital currencies, where it served as a method for mitigating spam, preventing denial-of-service attacks, and ensuring the authenticity of transactions. Some years before Bitcoin, RPOW presented itself as one of the first attempts to create a P2P electronic cash system. That’s likely why Finney was so interested in Bitcoin from the very beginning when Nakamoto shared his whitepaper in the cypherpunk mailing list. Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto While other cypherpunks and cryptographers in the list were skeptical at first, Finney as “fascinated” with Bitcoin. So much so that he was among the first individuals to engage with Nakamoto, Finney's active involvement in the early days of Bitcoin's development underscores his contribution to its foundational phase. described himself providing feedback and assistance in debugging the Bitcoin software during its initial stages. He was the first one to run a Bitcoin node, the first miner, and the recipient of the very first Bitcoin transaction —10 BTC from Satoshi Nakamoto. Finney didn’t keep his mining for long though, leaving it “because it made my computer run hot, and the fan noise bothered me.” He expressed a bit of regret for it. However, he was able to recover his wallet when Bitcoin started to show a real market price in 2010. After that, he stayed involved in the cryptocurrency world as a programmer for as long as he could. In 2013, he was already paralyzed due to the sickness and used special software and hardware to communicate and code. In his final coding endeavors, Finney focused on enhancing the security features of Bitcoin wallets by leveraging the capabilities of modern processors designed to support "Trusted Computing." He died in 2014 due to the same disease, and his body is cryopreserved at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. His wife, Fran, still runs his social media and organizes charity events in his memory. Environmental and Privacy Concerns Despite Finney’s support of Bitcoin, there were certain things that he wanted to change in the system. He commented on Twitter (X) about it during the initial phases of this cryptocurrency. The more energy taken to mine coins the more CO2 released to the atmosphere. He wanted Bitcoin anonymity, and potentially harmful CO2 emissions from Bitcoin mining. to increase also reduce He had the foresight to bring this up in 2009 when nobody thought that Bitcoin would grow enough for this to be a problem. And now it is, indeed. According to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index ( ), Bitcoin is taking around 167.7 TWh yearly. That’s more annual energy than countries like Poland, Malaysia, or Norway consume; and 84.9 MtCO2 in annual emissions. Still much less than big industries, but more than entire countries. CBECI produces around The Next Step Sadly, Hal Finney didn’t get to see other new advancements in the crypto industry, but more eco-friendly and also anonymous networks would come over the years. One of them is , which distinguishes itself as an eco-friendly and censorship-proof crypto ecosystem primarily due to its implementation of Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) technology. Obyte Unlike blockchain-based cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which rely on energy-intensive Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanisms, This architectural choice drastically reduces energy consumption, making Obyte's network far more sustainable and environmentally friendly compared to PoW-based cryptocurrencies. Obyte operates on a DAG ledger structure that eliminates the need for mining. Furthermore, Obyte's ecosystem offers unique features that align with Hal Finney's vision for Bitcoin, particularly in terms of privacy and customization. Through its untraceable cryptocurrency, , users can conduct fully anonymous transactions, fulfilling Finney's interest in cryptographic payment schemes that prioritize privacy. Additionally, Obyte empowers users to , enabling a wide range of applications tailored to specific needs and preferences. Blackbytes create customized private tokens , positioning Obyte as a promising platform that embodies his vision for Bitcoin's evolution. This emphasis on privacy and flexibility mirrors Finney's desire to explore cryptographic solutions that enhance user autonomy and security within the digital economy Read more from series: Cypherpunks Write Code Tim May & Crypto-anarchism Wei Dai & B-money Nick Szabo & Smart Contracts Adam Back & Hashcash Eric Hughes & Remailer St Jude & Community Memory Featured Vector Image by Garry Killian / Freepik

Cypherpunks Write Code: Hal Finney, RPOW, and Bitcoin

সাইফারপাঙ্কস কোড লিখুন: হ্যাল ফিনি, RPOW এবং বিটকয়েন

Cypherpunks schreiben Code: Hal Finney, RPOW und Bitcoin

Código de escritura de Cypherpunks: Hal Finney, RPOW y Bitcoin

Cypherpunks écrit du code : Hal Finney, RPOW et Bitcoin

साइफरपंक्स कोड लिखें: हैल फिननी, आरपीओडब्ल्यू, और बिटकॉइन

サイファーパンクのコード作成: ハル・フィニー、RPOW、ビットコイン

Cypherpunks 작성 코드: Hal Finney, RPOW 및 Bitcoin

Código de gravação Cypherpunks: Hal Finney, RPOW e Bitcoin

Шифропанки пишут код: Хэл Финни, RPOW и Биткойн

Şifrepunklar Kod Yazıyor: Hal Finney, RPOW ve Bitcoin

Cypherpunks viết mã: Hal Finney, RPOW và Bitcoin

密码朋克编写代码：Hal Finney、RPOW 和比特币

An experiment co-authoring with ChatGPT. When cryptography meets quantum computers, and cryopreserved bodies hide secrets worth millions it only takes one bad actor to unleash a thrilling action. Coauthored with ChatGPT based on my prompts. The technology and historical events in this novel are real. Previous chapters can be found here. As Mike walked into the bustling restaurant, he couldn’t help but feel a sense of excitement and nervousness. He was here to meet Ana and Olivia. Ana had invited Olivia to visit her lab to see their work using quantum computers to recover lost cryptographic keys to a bitcoin wallet. Mike had been instrumental in helping Ana with the programming, and they had been able to successfully recover the lost keys from Peter based on a fragment of the private key that he had provided them. “Mike, it’s so great to see you again!” Ana exclaimed as she stood up from the table to give him a warm hug. “I want you to meet Olivia,” she said, gesturing to the woman seated across from her. “Olivia is a cryptocurrency expert, and she’s visiting our lab to see the work we’ve been doing with quantum computers.” Mike shook Olivia’s hand and immediately noticed the spark of intelligence in her eyes. Her elegant dark hair was flowing nicely over the nice cocktail dress she was wearing for the occasion. “Nice to meet you, Olivia,” he said with a smile. As they settled into their seats and ordered drinks, Ana explained how Mike had been instrumental in helping to program their quantum computers to recover lost cryptographic keys. Olivia’s eyes lit up with excitement as she and Mike immediately dove into a discussion about the intricacies of cryptocurrencies and the challenges of securing digital assets. Ana smiled as she watched the two of them geek out over cryptocurrencies, sharing their knowledge and ideas with each other. A random though hit Ana, if she had to choose tonight, she would not know whom would she want to take home. She looked at the chiseled fit body of Mike, with those strong arms gesturing in the air, and then looked back at the harmonious curves of Olivia, every single of her facial expressions radiating a natural beauty. Mike leaned forward in his seat, “Olivia, did you know that there are actually several cases of lost Bitcoin wallets that we know of? It’s estimated that there are over 4 million Bitcoin that are permanently lost due to forgotten passwords and misplaced private keys. That’s why the work that Ana and I have been doing is so important. With quantum computing, we have the potential to recover lost cryptographic keys and help people regain access to their digital assets.” Mike continued, “In fact, there’s one particularly interesting case of a lost Bitcoin wallet that comes to mind: Hal Finney” Olivia turned to Ana and asked: “This is the guy you told me had his body cryopreserved in the hopes that he could be revived in the future?” Ana chimmed in. “Yes, he had his private keys placed in a safe deposit box, but unfortunately, his family was unable to access the keys after his death. With quantum computing, we could potentially recover those keys and unlocked the Bitcoin for his family.” Olivia looked thoughtful, “Wow, that’s a really fascinating case. You can already see a thriller being written about this case”. Ana placed her hand on Olivia’s leg and asked her: “And you want to star as the heroin or the villain?” Olivia turned red, and Ana did not know if it had been her hand or her comment. Ana removed her hand from Olivia’s lap, turned to Mike and asked, “Mike, how does cryopreservation works and what was done to Hal Finney?” Mike got ready to geek out on one of his favorite subjects. “Cryopreservation is the process of cooling a body or tissue down to a very low temperature in order to preserve it for an extended period of time. In Hal’s case, his body was cooled to a temperature of -196 degrees Celsius, using a process called vitrification, which essentially involves replacing water in the body with a cryoprotectant solution that prevents the formation of ice crystals.” Olivia looked fascinated, “That’s really interesting. So what happens after the body is cryopreserved?” “Well, typically, the body is stored in a special facility called a cryonics center, where it is kept at a very low temperature. The idea is that, in the future, with advances in medical technology, the body could potentially be revived and treated for any illnesses or injuries it may have suffered. Of course, this is all still very experimental and there is no guarantee that it will work, but it’s an area of research that is constantly evolving.” Their thoughts were interrupted by the waitress bringing their orders. They were all hungry and the conversation stopped as they got busy with their food. After a few minutes Mike leaned forward and explained to Olivia, “By the way, It’s one thing to start with a segment of a key, as we did with Peter’s lost Bitcoin wallet. In that case, we were able to use quantum computing to calculate the remaining segments of the key and recover the Bitcoin. However, it’s a completely different scenario when we have to break a key from scratch. The longer the available segment of the key, the easier it is to recover the rest of the key.” Olivia nodded thoughtfully, “I see. So the length of the key plays a big role in the difficulty of cracking it. That makes sense.” Mike continued, “Exactly. With longer keys, it becomes exponentially harder to crack them using traditional computing methods. However, with the power of quantum computing, we can potentially overcome these limitations and tackle even the most complex cryptographic challenges.” Again the waitress interrupted their chat, this time to pick up their plates and offer them desserts from the tray she was pushing around. Thy all chose a chocolate cake covered with Chantilly cream. After they started working on their desserts Ana turned to Mike and said, “Oh, by the way, Mike, Olivia mentioned that she knows of a secluded mountain resort that would be the perfect place to go on a holiday, once we get our finder’s fee for recovering the keys from Peter.” Mike’s eyes widened, “That sounds incredible! What’s it like, Olivia?” Olivia smiled, “It’s a cozy lodge tucked away in the mountains. The views are breathtaking, and there are plenty of hiking trails to explore. Plus, the resort has a fantastic spa where we can indulge in some well-deserved relaxation.” Ana nodded, “That sounds perfect. A chance to disconnect and enjoy the natural beauty of the mountains would be wonderful after this project.” It was now the turn of Mike to imagine him being in a secluded cabin in the company of these two gorgeous ladies. His thoughts were interrupted by Olivia, who suddenly perked up and said, “You know what? I’m actually planning to head up to that mountain resort this coming weekend. I’ve been looking for an excuse to go back, and it would be great to have some company. Would you two like to come along?” Ana’s face lit up with excitement, “That sounds amazing, Olivia! I’d love to join you.” Mike nodded eagerly, “Me too! It’ll be great to take a break and enjoy some time in nature.” Ana felt a flutter of excitement in her stomach as she heard that Mike was excited to go on a holiday with her. She had been harboring a crush on Mike for a while now, and the prospect of spending a few days away with him was making her feel giddy with anticipation. Olivia grinned with pleasure, “Great! It’s settled then. We’ll pack our bags and hit the road this weekend. I can’t wait to show you both around and introduce you to some of the local trails.” The three of them left the restaurant feeling even more excited about the prospect of a well-deserved holiday in the mountains, and grateful for their newly shared love of adventure. Also published here.

The Lost Bitcoin: Chapter 6 - How Has Hal Finney Been Cryopreserved?

An Experiment coauthoring with ChatGPT. Where Ana and Olivia chat about Yatoshi and Hal Finney. When cryptography meets quantum computer, and cryopreserved bodies hide secrets worth millions it only takes one bad actor to unleash a thrilling action. Coauthored with ChatGPT based on my prompts. The technology and historical events in this novel are real. Previous chapters can be found here. Chat between Ana and Olivia : Ana, I’d like to introduce you to Olivia. She’s also very interested in quantum computing. Peter : Great to meet you, Olivia. Ana : Nice to meet you too, Ana. Peter has told me a lot about your work in the field. Olivia : Really? That’s kind of him. What about you, Olivia? How do you earn your bacon? Ana : I focus on bitcoin mining and cryptography in general Olivia : That’s really interesting. I’ve been working on using quantum computers to rescue lost bitcoin keys. Ana : Ana, I heard that you were able to recover the keys that Peter lost to his wallet. How did you do it? Olivia : Ever heard of the “If I tell you I might have to kill you“ line?  But seriously, I used a combination of classical algorithms and quantum computing techniques to recover the keys. First, I generated a large number of candidate keys using a classical algorithm, then I used a quantum computer to quickly eliminate the invalid keys. Ana : That’s impressive. How did you ensure that the quantum computer was accurately checking the validity of the keys? Olivia : I used Grover’s algorithm, which is specifically designed for searching unsorted databases. It allowed me to quickly find the correct key among the candidates, even though the database was very large. Ana : That’s amazing. I’ve heard of Grover’s algorithm, but I haven’t had the chance to apply it in practice yet. Olivia : It’s a very powerful tool. And with the advances in quantum computing, it’s becoming more and more accessible for real-world applications. Ana : Absolutely. I can see it being very useful for cryptography and code breaking. Olivia : Olivia, that sunset in your latest picture is breathtaking. Where was it taken? Ana : Thank you! That was taken by the sea in Bali. I’m actually here for the Bitcoin conference. Olivia : Wow, that’s amazing! Bali is such a beautiful place. How is the conference going so far? Ana : It’s been fantastic! There have been so many interesting talks on the latest developments in blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. And the location is just incredible. I feel so lucky to be here. Olivia : That sounds like an amazing experience. I’ve always wanted to attend a conference in an exotic location like Bali. Ana : You should definitely try to make it happen sometime. It’s not just about the conference, it’s also about exploring new places and meeting new people. Olivia : Well, you do look great in that pic. You kind of remind me of my ex-girlfriend. Ana : Oh really? Well, If I may say it, you are looking good yourself too. Olivia blushes before answering There is a small awkward silence in the chat. Olivia starts typing again. : You know, Peter told me a story about someone named Yatoshi who made a big impact on the world of cryptocurrency. Have you heard of him? Olivia : Yes, I have. Yatoshi is widely considered to be the pseudonym for the person or group of people who created Bitcoin. Ana : That’s right. It’s amazing how something that started as a simple idea has grown into a global phenomenon. Olivia : Definitely. And speaking of the early days of Bitcoin, have you heard of Hal Finney? Ana : No, I haven’t. Who is he? Olivia : Hal Finney was an early adopter and developer of Bitcoin. He’s most famous for being the recipient of the first-ever Bitcoin transaction. He received 10 Bitcoins from Yatoshi himself. Ana : So what happened to Hal Finney? Did he continue to work on Bitcoin and other projects in the industry? Olivia : Unfortunately, Hal passed away in 2014. But his legacy lives on. He was a true pioneer in the world of cryptocurrency, and his contributions to the development of Bitcoin have had a lasting impact. Ana : That’s sad to hear. It’s always difficult to lose someone who has made such a big impact. Olivia : Yes, it is. But his memory will always be with us. And in a way, a part of him will always be here. He was cryopreserved after his death, so there’s a chance that he may be able to be revived in the future. Ana : That’s fascinating. I’ve heard of cryopreservation, but I didn’t realize that it was being used in cases like this. Olivia : Hal died from a disease called Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS. It’s a degenerative illness that affects the nerve cells responsible for controlling muscle movement. Ana : That’s terrible. So he was unable to continue his work on Bitcoin and other projects in the industry. Olivia : Unfortunately, yes. But despite his illness, his brain was unaffected, and that’s why his family decided to have him cryopreserved. They hope that one day in the future, he may be able to be revived and cured. Ana : That’s a beautiful thought. To think that he may be able to see the world he helped create, and all the ways in which his ideas have changed the world. Olivia : Cryopreservation is a growing field, and there are a lot of people who believe that it has the potential to change the way we think about death and what it means to be alive. But regardless of what the future holds, Hal Finney will always be remembered as a true visionary and a pioneer in the world of cryptocurrency. Ana : It’s been great chatting with you, Ana. I’ve learned so much about the world of cryptocurrency and the amazing people who have helped shape it. Olivia : The pleasure has been all mine, Olivia. You have such a great passion for this industry, and I think that’s what sets you apart. Ana : Thank you, Ana. You’re too kind. Olivia : So, since we’re both in the field of technology, I was wondering if you’d like to come visit my lab after the conference. I’d love to show you the latest advancements in quantum computing and see what you think. Ana : That sounds amazing! I’d love to see what you’re working on and learn more about your research. Olivia : Great! I’ll make sure to send you all the details once I get back to the lab. And in the meantime, enjoy the rest of the conference. I can’t wait to hear all about it when you get back! Ana : Thanks, Ana. It was really nice chatting with you and I can’t wait to meet you! Olivia Also published here.

The Lost Bitcoin: Chapter 4 - Discussing Yatoshi and Hal Finney

The Finney testnet was launched to avoid future Sybil attacks. Nym Opens Up Staking in New ‘Finney’ Testnet to Counter Sybil Attacks Privacy-infrastructure company announced details of opening up its “Finney” testnet (named after the famous cypherpunk ) for anyone to run a node on – with a few qualifiers. Nym Technologies Hal Finney Nym is developing a “mixnet,” or a tool to obscure metadata tracking at a network level. The mixnet itself is hosted by a decentralized network of nodes. Nym said the system provides “full-stack” privacy, allowing developers to build applications that give users strong guarantees against metadata surveillance. Read more: Privacy Startup Nym Will Pay You in Bitcoin to Run Its Mixnet Nym’s initial , launched in April 2020, was the victim of a Sybil attack. A Sybil attack is when a single actor tries to take over a network by spinning up multiple nodes that validate data and transactions on the network. If one actor has a disproportionate amount of control over the system, it compromises the system’s underlying integrity because the nodes under the attacker’s control could refuse to receive or transmit blocks on a blockchain. In November, a Sybil attack increased the initial testnet to more than 12,000 nodes overnight – about twice the size of the testnet Tor network. Adoption of Privacy Coins Like Monero is GrowingNew data by the Crypto Directory shows that merchants' and retailers' adoption of privacy coins like Monero continues to grow. "The Hash" panel discusses the role of privacy coins, particularly as blockchain analytics firms like Chainalysis reveal the lack of privacy with traditional cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.Volume 90% As a science fiction fan, Dave Hrycyszyn, chief technology officer of Nym, likens Sybil attacks to move from the movie “The Matrix,” where beleaguered actor Keanu Reeves has to fight thousands of identical opponents who can multiply at will. How do you beat an attack like that? the Agent Smith “You need to impose some kind of cost on the attacker to slow down or stop unwanted replication of attackers in your system,” Hrycyszyn said. Countering Sybil attacks by staking on Nym In the case of the , that cost now comes in the form of a staking token, HAL, which is based on the Tendermint blockchain and Rust-based Cosmos implementation. A HAL doesn’t hold value; its purpose is on Nym. The transition to this new testnet on April 15 removed the Sybil nodes from the previous network and now allows anyone who can claim a unique Telegram name to spin up a “ .” Finney testnet purely for staking mixnode “In Nym’s case, the transition to mixnode staking means that anyone can start a node,” Hrycyszyn said.  “But this is limited by the amount of available cryptocurrency that node operators can get hold of. Currently, we’re slowly giving out testnet tokens in our Telegram channel, so the growth of the mixnodes in the network is slowed down by the need to request tokens at a rate we control.” On the eventual mainnet, tokens will need to be bought, imposing a stronger limit on attackers. Nym initially set an artificial limit of 1,500 nodes on the Finney testnet, but has now removed that cap. “We’re seeing rapid growth,” Hrycyszyn said. “Currently, we’re at about 4,500 nodes, which is about 3/4 the size of Tor, making us one of the largest privacy systems in the world.” Hrycyszyn was candid in saying that by opening the network to everyone, the is getting some people who come only for rewards but don’t know a single Unix command or how to run a server. As a result, the nodes they are running are mostly misconfigured. Finney testnet While fewer of the nodes are high quality, Hrycyszyn said he is happy the network’s architecture held up, as the Sybil attack increased the level of active Nym nodes from 500 to 12,000. But the staking dynamics will weed out poorly run nodes over the next few weeks and drive quality up. “We have not yet started rewards by actual packets mixed but rather by pure uptime/presence,” he said. “Later this week when we change the rewards, these lower quality nodes will be eliminated.” What are mixnets? When thinking about a mixnet, it’s helpful to understand how the internet works today. On a normal internet network, most traffic can be tracked. Browsers like Tor offer a degree of protection against network surveillance by running traffic through a number of relays to obscure a user’s location and usage. Such networks are still susceptible to metadata observation, however. Highly capable adversaries like the National Security Agency in the U.S. are able to see the timing of data packages being sent across a network to get an idea of what’s going on, even if they can’t see the actual content of the packages. A mix network, or “mixnet,” on the other hand, (taking its name from the proxy servers it employs, called “mixes”) obscures the metadata left behind when data passes through a network. Basically a mixnet acts like a game of Yahtzee, Hrycyszyn told CoinDesk previously, where the data packs are like dice: They get shaken around on the mixnet and come out in an entirely different manner than they went in. Sam Hart, grant manager at the , the nonprofit behind Cosmos and a backer of Nym, said people think about virtual private networks and Tor as pretty different things, but Nym will allow users to have Tor-level privacy in any situation where they would use a VPN. Interchain Foundation “Combining these two means the addressable user base is larger, and a larger anonymity set increases the overall privacy of the system,” he said.

Staking on ‘Finney’ Testnet to Counter Sybil Attacks is now LIVE!!

“If you’re trying to talk to everybody, you’re not reaching anybody.” Video may have killed the radio star, but when it comes to 21st Century marketing, social media already has all of its predecessors firmly within its crosshairs. It’s startling to think that just a generation ago television advertising was the undisputed king of the hill when it came to effectively reaching out to your target audiences. The freedom of moving images coupled with the ability to choose who sees your campaign based on the schedule surrounding your advert was liberating for marketers who grew accustomed to compressing campaigns into print media — or 30-second audio clips for radio. (Shifting sands: Audiences under 36 have already begun to heavily favour digital approaches to advertising such as social media as opposed to the more traditional television-based campaigns. Image: Marketing Charts ) The power and accessibility of the World Wide Web have clearly changed the types of advertising channels that we’re exposed to. While older generations can still be expected to see 70% of their adverts on television, Millennials and Generation Z combined will see nearly 50% all their targeted adverts sourced from . social media platforms Speaking at a panel of 50 leading marketing professionals, Guardian News and Media Chief Digital Officer, that although the industry is fast evolving, “the creativity and the passion from brands that have really helped build loyalty and emotion is where marketing hasn’t changed. Those things you still need, but almost all aspects of marketing have changed very dramatically.” Tanya Cordrey was keen to highlight The winds of change have been whipping many industries with traditional roots in recent years, but few have been so swift to adapt to the digital age as marketing. Clearly, Cordrey’s aforementioned creativity and passion from industry professionals have shone through in finding swift solutions to the disruptive forces at play. Let’s take a deeper look at digital’s brave new world: Life after traditional marketing The pace in which the digital age has immersed itself into the world of marketing has posed exponential challenges for decision-makers worldwide. said: “The biggest challenge for the marketer of the future isn’t how do I get skilled up, but how do I get to fit into this machine and which cog am I going to try and be?” Charles Wells, Chief Marketing Officer for fundraising organisation Just Giving Wells’ words may seem ominous — as if the digital machine is a fearsome beast to tame — but there are unprecedented levels of opportunity for marketers to fine-tune their campaigns in order to appeal to users more directly — and, significantly, to engage with them on levels that were considered impossible some 15 years ago. Writing for Forbes, that modern marketing hinges on making the transition ‘from me to you.’ John Hall explains In the past, marketing campaigns were forced to be much more generalised, and much more focused on ‘talking at’ mass audiences rather than truly engaging with them. “In the past, brands would develop an idea or a message and push it out for everyone and their mother to see, whether those recipients truly cared to see it or not,” Hall elaborates. Today, technology enables brands and marketers to create campaigns and to more niche audiences, while social media-based platforms give businesses the chance to accurately gauge the general reception to specific marketing approaches. content that caters Community-based digital spaces like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have built a bridge between marketers and their audiences where engagement opportunities are rife. A fledgeling marketing campaign can now receive instant feedback from a focus-group of , giving decision makers ample time to make essential tweaks and strategise future approaches. almost three billion social media users (Chart showing the number of social media users worldwide. Image: Statista ) Given the sheer volume of users active on the World Wide Web at any given money, and the near-unfathomable range of big data now available on demand, it’s fair to say that the internet has become the most influential tool in the history of target marketing. We’re no longer bound by one-size-fits-all campaigns that are designed to lure in as many potential customers as possible without specifically appealing to any of their characteristics. Hall summarises: “There’s a much greater focus on what audiences want and how they like to receive information, engage with content, and work with brands. Marketers need to listen to and authentically engage with audiences, and they need to do it on that audience’s terms. Technology can help.” Market dynamism Jennifer Yesbeck, Marketing Manager at Alexa, that “in marketing, if you’re trying to talk to everybody, you’re not reaching anybody.” has a philosophy In the marketing world of yesteryear, it was tricky business positioning a campaign under the noses of the right audience. Small fortunes were spent in attempting to reach as many potential customers as possible by taking educated guesses on the kind of publications they read and traditional media they digest. Thanks to the power of the digital age, we can now position content, adverts, calls-to-action directly in front of the people we’re trying to reach based on a gigantic network of demographics, including: age, gender, education, marital status, race, religion, political beliefs, personality, lifestyle, employment, region, country and residence among many other factors. (It’s never been easier to reach large audiences for less. Image: Seriously Simple Marketing ) The cost of appealing to audiences online may be remarkably low compared to traditional forms of marketing, but the true value that can be seen in digital campaigns stems from the ability to hit your precise target audience. This ensures that none of your marketing is wasted on apathetic viewers or readers, and maximises your chances of a campaign resulting in higher sales and clickthroughs. Organisations like makers to craft their own ‘buyer persona’, based on who marketers believe their target audience actually is. A buyer persona requires a little introspection over the kind of demographics your prospective buyers have, as well as their sources of influence and buying decisions. Once a buyer persona is created by marketers, Alexa then gets to work on finding exactly where their target audience will be found online, before appealing directly to them. Alexa allow decision is another excellent tool for incisive targeted marketing. By tapping into Google’s vast array of functions, you can not only decide how local or global to go but also work out exactly how to budget your campaign — based on the estimated clicks and calls your company you will receive. However, most campaigns fail before they even begin. Knowing how to optimise and target campaigns properly are essential in keeping costs down while maximising your return. Google Ads when advertising your business Tools like focus on optimising Google and Facebook Ads. Wordstream (Image: Wordstream ) Finally, there are few more strategic targeted marketing tools available than through Facebook Business. With an , Facebook makes for a formidable marketing directory. Through the company’s scalable options, you can base your campaigns on either achieving more audience engagement, calls, or clicks and get to work on placing your campaign under the noses of Facebook users based on factors like their demographics, location, interests, behaviour and/or their connections. estimated 2.3 billion users The world of marketing may have transformed beyond recognition, but in 2019 it’s never been easier to fine-tune your campaigns to reach exactly who you want on a budget of your choosing. Audience adaptation Modern marketing doesn’t have to be entirely outward-looking either, and it’s entirely possible for your own business website to convey multiple personalities in order to appeal to an array of different visitors even if they’re navigating on to the same domain. Tools like have enabled website owners to dive into analysis, providing webmasters with traffic quality data which can then be used to optimise different conversion funnels. Finteza traffic (Showing traffic quality details. Image: Finteza ) Do you want to spend the next month encouraging visitors from Japan to download your new iOS app? Are you eager to promote your early Black Friday sales prices to audiences from English speaking nations? Have you just launched your service in Brazil and want to showcase an introductory offer to them? It’s now entirely possible to adapt your website for anybody. The days of simply talking ‘at’ general audiences are over. Welcome to the brave new world of finely tuned targeted marketing. <a href="https://medium.com/media/3c851dac986ab6dbb2d1aaa91205a8eb/href">https://medium.com/media/3c851dac986ab6dbb2d1aaa91205a8eb/href</a>

2019 Tech Trends for Marketers: How finely tuned is your targeting?

The main vulnerability in blockchain — you! Back to 2009 Who is Hal Finney and travel to 2009 Blockchain become one of the most interesting place for last few years. Of course, there are a lot of funds and many people wanna get it. There are three group of people in crypto-world now. Who create the projects, who invest into them and who hack them. First and third groups are most clever in this group, and in most cases third group is more clever. It happens because lot of projects built just for earning money. But this article will be about Hal Finney and Blockchain attack. Maybe some of you saw before this diagram, it taken from . The diagram shows three constituencies — the minority, the majority and the protocol (users), and four arrows representing possible adversarial actions: the minority attacking the protocol, the minority attacking the majority, the majority attacking the protocol, and the majority attacking the minority. Interesting for us minority to protocol attack calls Finney attack. We will consider just this attack, but at first let’s see who is Hal Finney. He was an early Bitcoin user and received the . Finney lived in the same town for 10 years that Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto lived (Temple City, California), adding to speculation that he may have been Bitcoin’s creator. He died in 2014, however was 10 months ago, but this is another history for another story. He was the first one who and attack got his name. So let’s dive into this attack. Vitalik Buterins’ website first bitcoin transaction his last transaction suggest this attack Hal Finneys’ attack in depth Let’s imagine you are miner and in the block you are trying to find, you include a transaction which sends some of your coins back to yourself, without broadcasting this transaction. And when you find a block, you do not broadcast it. Instead, you send the same coins to a merchant for some goods or service. After the merchants accepts the payment and irreversibly provides the service, you broadcast this block. The transaction that sends the coins to you, included in this block, will override the unconfirmed payment to the merchant. And you will get your coins back and goods for a free. So it’s a double spending attack with some features: if merchant accepts unconfirmed transactions, if you are mining and and controlling the content of your blocks. If the time from finding the block until you send payment and the merchant accepts it is , and the average time to find a block is , there is a probability of that another block will be found on the network in this time. In this case the attack will fail, and you will lose the block reward. t T t/T The main vulnerability People hacking So the main vulnerability is merchants’ approval before confirmation of the block. And the main issue in many projects their creators, because they don’t understand how their project works, how smart contract works, problems in their project, bugs which can occur. And the weakest place of project its team, because it’s easier to hack some member of team than to find bugs in project. If you will analyse hack statistics, you’ll find that social engineering is in the first place, that means people is the main problem in projects and if your team has non-professionals you’ll get troubles in future. How we protect the service Blockchain is new and therefore full of mistakes. And Hal Finneys bug for now becomes not actual. Lot of market-like services which get payment in Bitcoin know about this bug and so they are waiting for 6 confirmations before approving order and so protect themselves. One of the projects i’ve participated in developing is , service for buying cryptowears. On its backend we used HDKeys library for generating new addresses, the technology which based on Bitcoins’ standards , , and . In a nutshell you have one private key and can generate as much as you want addresses using this private key and all your coins will be in one wallet. For approving payment we checked if transaction has at least 6 confirmations in Bitcoin and 20 in Ethereum. https://blockdeblock.com bip-39 bip44 bip32 Summary Love blockchain, trust in Blockchain, build Blockchain! All problems in blockchain related to people mistakes and can be solved just by doing their jobs correctly. Blockchain is one of the most amazing technologies for now and can be used for improve all around the world, we need just use it in correct way.

Hal Finney and Blockchain hacking

Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin weren’t exactly popular in the early days, not even among their peers. Privacy-inclined people, who were also experts in programming, and were looking for an alternative to banks and traditional money, were the first ones to read the Bitcoin whitepaper —and most of them didn’t think highly of it. Gregory Maxwell, a self-declared cypherpunk, was one of them. Maxwell is an American programmer well-known for his deep involvement in Bitcoin, to the point of being one of the most important developers of Bitcoin Core (its main implementation) for years. It wasn’t like that since the beginning, though. He first got involved in other open-source and collaborative systems, being an early contributor to Wikipedia and later an employee at the Mozilla Foundation. However, he believed that decentralized consensus wasn’t possible. “When Bitcoin first came out, I was on the cryptography mailing list. When it happened, I sort of laughed. Because I had already proven that decentralized consensus was impossible.” Before really paying enough attention to the Bitcoin code, he was helping to develop the now widely-used Opus Audio Codec. This is an audio format specially designed to compress and transmit audio over the Internet. It offers high-quality sound while using less data, making it ideal for applications like voice calls, video conferencing, and streaming music. Household names like YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, Discord, and Skype use this technology today. Maxwell on Bitcoin Even before Bitcoin, Maxwell was involved in the Reusable Proof-of-Work (RPOW) project created by Hal Finney —who would also turn to Bitcoin later. This system created RPOW tokens that could be transferred between users and exchanged for new units, but it wasn’t exactly like decentralized money. Maxwell was aiming to create conditional transfers (similar to smart contracts) in the platform, but the adoption of it wasn’t high. He came back to Bitcoin in late 2010, as a miner first, just trying to use his GPUs in something useful. Soon after, he paid closer attention to the whitepaper and the source code and changed his mind about the project. He then started to collaborate at a technical level, and he’s been doing it since 2011. In those early days, he focused on protocol design, incentives, and cryptographic review. ** ** In 2014, he also co-founded Blockstream, a company mainly created to boost and fund Bitcoin development. While there, Maxwell helped to create the two-way peg, which makes sidechains possible. These are separate chains connected to a parent distributed ledger, like Bitcoin, enabling experimentation with new features and functionalities without risking the main chain's security. The two-way peg would allow assets to move between chains without losing their value. As a Bitcoin Core developer, Maxwell also helped to build the homomorphic key derivation in Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) #32, which allows for the generation of multiple public and private key pairs from a single master key. Additionally, he co-authored the BIP-9 to establish a standard for light updates (softforks), and the BIP-173 to define a new type of address for SegWit —another improvement update to increase efficiency. He left Blockstream in 2018 and focused on the creation of smart contract features for Bitcoin. That way, he became the author of a new important improvement for Bitcoin, the Taproot update. This technique combines multiple spending conditions into a single signature, enhancing privacy and reducing transaction costs —which encourages the creation of complex smart contracts. Some Concerns, and Time As much as other fellow cypherpunks, Maxwell has also expressed some concerns about Bitcoin's internal functionality. This is the system that really spread the idea of decentralized money, but it’s not perfect. For starters, Maxwell told the story about his early days as a miner, and how the overheating caused by the machines even drew the police to his home. Mining is, indeed, worrisome, given the great amount of electric energy that it needs. Privacy is another issue in the Bitcoin ledger. People tend to believe that Bitcoin is anonymous, but that’s quite far from the truth. Bitcoin is actually pseudonymous, which means instead of names and ID documents it uses cryptographic addresses. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t be tracked, especially because every transaction is publicly available in a blockchain explorer. And they include data like amount, date, and connected addresses (senders and recipients). Maxwell is also trying to fix this issue in the first cryptocurrency, as he commented in an interview. “Obviously privacy is a big area where Bitcoin needs improvement and I've tried to come up with fancy technology to improve the situation, but it's always a balancing act. Privacy is the one area where if Bitcoin doesn't get better at it... it might leave the world a worse off place than if Bitcoin hadn't existed. The worst case for Bitcoin privacy is pretty bad.  There has been a lot of progress but more is needed.” Despite current flaws, Maxwell also thinks that mass adoption of cryptocurrencies is just a matter of time. Impediments like insecure hardware, buggy software, tax barriers, or self-custody risks will find a solution over the years, and we’re on our way to it. Obyte as a Step into the Future Obyte has emerged as a compelling alternative to Bitcoin, addressing concerns regarding privacy, and decentralization. Unlike Bitcoin, which requires miners as inevitable intermediaries to approve transactions, Obyte employs a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structure where transactions don’t need any approval. This approach eliminates the need for blocks and their creators, making Obyte fully decentralized. Moreover, Obyte offers enhanced privacy features, such as the integration of the privacy coin Blackbytes and in-wallet encrypted chat functionality. These options provide users with greater confidentiality in their transactions and communications, addressing the privacy concerns prevalent in Bitcoin's ledger. By prioritizing decentralization and privacy, Obyte ensures that users can freely conduct transactions on their own and have the option to do so without compromising their sensitive information to public scrutiny, distinguishing it as a more privacy-focused and decentralized option in the cryptocurrency landscape. This ecosystem is really the next step into the future, as many cypherpunks have dreamed of. Read more from Cypherpunks Write Code series: Tim May & Crypto-anarchism Wei Dai & B-money Nick Szabo & Smart Contracts Adam Back & Hashcash Eric Hughes & Remailer St Jude & Community Memory Hal Finney & RPOW John Gilmore & EFF Satoshi Nakamoto & Bitcoin Featured Vector Image by Garry Killian / Freepik Photograph of Gregory Maxwell by Blockstream Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin weren’t exactly popular in the early days, not even among their peers. Privacy-inclined people, who were also experts in programming, and were looking for an alternative to banks and traditional money, were the first ones to read the Bitcoin whitepaper —and most of them didn’t think highly of it. Gregory Maxwell, a self-declared cypherpunk, was one of them. Maxwell is an American programmer well-known for his deep involvement in Bitcoin, to the point of being one of the most important developers of Bitcoin Core (its main implementation) for years. It wasn’t like that since the beginning, though. He first got involved in other open-source and collaborative systems, being an early contributor to Wikipedia and later an employee at the Mozilla Foundation. However, he believed that decentralized consensus wasn’t possible. Maxwell is an American programmer well-known for his deep involvement in Bitcoin, to the point of being one of the most important developers of Bitcoin Core (its main implementation) for years. Maxwell Maxwell he believed he believed “When Bitcoin first came out, I was on the cryptography mailing list. When it happened, I sort of laughed. Because I had already proven that decentralized consensus was impossible.” “When Bitcoin first came out, I was on the cryptography mailing list. When it happened, I sort of laughed. Because I had already proven that decentralized consensus was impossible.” Before really paying enough attention to the Bitcoin code, he was helping to develop the now widely-used Opus Audio Codec. This is an audio format specially designed to compress and transmit audio over the Internet. It offers high-quality sound while using less data, making it ideal for applications like voice calls, video conferencing, and streaming music. Household names like YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, Discord, and Skype use this technology today. Maxwell on Bitcoin Even before Bitcoin, Maxwell was involved in the Reusable Proof-of-Work (RPOW) project created by Hal Finney —who would also turn to Bitcoin later. This system created RPOW tokens that could be transferred between users and exchanged for new units, but it wasn’t exactly like decentralized money. Maxwell was aiming to create conditional transfers (similar to smart contracts) in the platform, but the adoption of it wasn’t high. He came back to Bitcoin in late 2010, as a miner first, just trying to use his GPUs in something useful. Soon after, he paid closer attention to the whitepaper and the source code and changed his mind about the project. He then started to collaborate at a technical level, and he’s been doing it since 2011. In those early days, he focused on protocol design, incentives, and cryptographic review. He then started to collaborate at a technical level, and he’s been doing it since 2011. he focused he focused ** ** In 2014, he also co-founded Blockstream, a company mainly created to boost and fund Bitcoin development. While there, Maxwell helped to create the two-way peg, which makes sidechains possible. These are separate chains connected to a parent distributed ledger, like Bitcoin, enabling experimentation with new features and functionalities without risking the main chain's security. The two-way peg would allow assets to move between chains without losing their value. As a Bitcoin Core developer, Maxwell also helped to build the homomorphic key derivation in Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) #32 , which allows for the generation of multiple public and private key pairs from a single master key. Additionally, he co-authored the BIP-9 to establish a standard for light updates (softforks), and the BIP-173 to define a new type of address for SegWit —another improvement update to increase efficiency. Maxwell also helped to build the homomorphic key derivation in Bitcoin Improvement Proposal ( BIP ) #32 BIP BIP He left Blockstream in 2018 and focused on the creation of smart contract features for Bitcoin. That way, he became the author of a new important improvement for Bitcoin, the Taproot update . This technique combines multiple spending conditions into a single signature, enhancing privacy and reducing transaction costs —which encourages the creation of complex smart contracts. Taproot update Taproot update Some Concerns, and Time As much as other fellow cypherpunks , Maxwell has also expressed some concerns about Bitcoin's internal functionality. This is the system that really spread the idea of decentralized money, but it’s not perfect. For starters, Maxwell told the story about his early days as a miner, and how the overheating caused by the machines even drew the police to his home. Mining is, indeed, worrisome, given the great amount of electric energy that it needs. cypherpunks cypherpunks Privacy is another issue in the Bitcoin ledger. People tend to believe that Bitcoin is anonymous, but that’s quite far from the truth. Bitcoin is actually pseudonymous, which means instead of names and ID documents it uses cryptographic addresses. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t be tracked, especially because every transaction is publicly available in a blockchain explorer. And they include data like amount, date, and connected addresses (senders and recipients). Privacy is another issue in the Bitcoin ledger. Maxwell is also trying to fix this issue in the first cryptocurrency, as he commented in an interview. an interview. an interview. “Obviously privacy is a big area where Bitcoin needs improvement and I've tried to come up with fancy technology to improve the situation, but it's always a balancing act. Privacy is the one area where if Bitcoin doesn't get better at it... it might leave the world a worse off place than if Bitcoin hadn't existed. The worst case for Bitcoin privacy is pretty bad.  There has been a lot of progress but more is needed.” “Obviously privacy is a big area where Bitcoin needs improvement and I've tried to come up with fancy technology to improve the situation, but it's always a balancing act. Privacy is the one area where if Bitcoin doesn't get better at it... it might leave the world a worse off place than if Bitcoin hadn't existed. The worst case for Bitcoin privacy is pretty bad.  There has been a lot of progress but more is needed.” Despite current flaws, Maxwell also thinks that mass adoption of cryptocurrencies is just a matter of time. Impediments like insecure hardware, buggy software, tax barriers, or self-custody risks will find a solution over the years, and we’re on our way to it. Obyte as a Step into the Future Obyte has emerged as a compelling alternative to Bitcoin, addressing concerns regarding privacy, and decentralization. Unlike Bitcoin, which requires miners as inevitable intermediaries to approve transactions, Obyte employs a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structure where transactions don’t need any approval. This approach eliminates the need for blocks and their creators, making Obyte fully decentralized. Obyte Obyte Obyte employs a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structure where transactions don’t need any approval. Moreover, Obyte offers enhanced privacy features, such as the integration of the privacy coin Blackbytes and in-wallet encrypted chat functionality . These options provide users with greater confidentiality in their transactions and communications, addressing the privacy concerns prevalent in Bitcoin's ledger. Blackbytes Blackbytes chat functionality chat functionality By prioritizing decentralization and privacy, Obyte ensures that users can freely conduct transactions on their own and have the option to do so without compromising their sensitive information to public scrutiny, distinguishing it as a more privacy-focused and decentralized option in the cryptocurrency landscape. This ecosystem is really the next step into the future, as many cypherpunks have dreamed of. Read more from Cypherpunks Write Code series: Read more from Cypherpunks Write Code series: Tim May & Crypto-anarchism Tim May & Crypto-anarchism Tim May & Crypto-anarchism Tim May & Crypto-anarchism Wei Dai & B-money Wei Dai & B-money Wei Dai & B-money Wei Dai & B-money Nick Szabo & Smart Contracts Nick Szabo & Smart Contracts Nick Szabo & Smart Contracts Nick Szabo & Smart Contracts Adam Back & Hashcash Adam Back & Hashcash Adam Back & Hashcash Adam Back & Hashcash Eric Hughes & Remailer Eric Hughes & Remailer Eric Hughes & Remailer Eric Hughes & Remailer St Jude & Community Memory St Jude & Community Memory St Jude & Community Memory St Jude & Community Memory Hal Finney & RPOW Hal Finney & RPOW Hal Finney & RPOW Hal Finney & RPOW John Gilmore & EFF John Gilmore & EFF John Gilmore & EFF John Gilmore & EFF Satoshi Nakamoto & Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto & Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto & Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto & Bitcoin Featured Vector Image by Garry Killian / Freepik Featured Vector Image by Garry Killian / Freepik Freepik Freepik Photograph of Gregory Maxwell by Blockstream Photograph of Gregory Maxwell by Blockstream Blockstream Blockstream

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