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Sales is a fast-paced world where innovation never rests. In this dynamic landscape, traditional sales techniques are getting a makeover. Enter the game-changer: interactive product demos. This exciting field of sales technology has been making waves, transforming the way businesses engage with customers and supercharging their sales efforts. Gone are the days of boring presentations and dull brochures. Interactive product demos are stealing the spotlight, empowering sales teams to create captivating, personalized, and unforgettable experiences for potential customers. By leveraging cutting-edge technology, these demos allow customers to dive in, explore, and truly experience the value of products in real time. So, what's the big deal with interactivity? Well, it bridges the gap between abstract concepts and real understanding. Unlike traditional demos, interactive product demos let customers roll up their sleeves and actively engage with the features that matter to them. Whether it's software or physical products, this game-changing approach allows potential customers to navigate, play around, and see how a product can solve their unique needs and pain points. Customization is the name of the game when it comes to interactive product demos. Sales teams can tailor the experience to suit each prospect's preferences, goals, and concerns. By addressing specific pain points and showcasing the most relevant aspects of the product, sales professionals can build stronger connections and boost their chances of winning over potential customers. So who are the main players in this emerging field and how do they stack up against each other? We’ll go through them all here, including Walnut, Reprise, Demostack, Navattic, Storylane, and Consensus. Walnut is an interactive, full-funnel demo platform that is likely one of the first to market. It seems to place emphasis on sales and marketing teams. The platform offers a robust set of features, often publishes amusing videos on social media to tell their story and vision, and has garnered significant attention from audiences on LinkedIn. Online testimonials for Walnut often discuss the platform's quick onboarding process and ease of use, particularly when capturing different customer dashboards. Walnut The good: Your GTM team can use it regardless of company size. Your marketing team can use it to drive better leads with embedded product tours on their site that act exactly like the product, and your presales team can quickly spin up tailor-made demos that showcase the relevant features for each prospect. Sales teams can quickly share or deliver demos that keep prospects engaged, and customer success can build interactive tutorials to improve product adoption. Plus, because it directly impacts sales, you’ll quickly see your ROI. : The price is slightly higher than some of the solutions on this list, while they seemingly spend a lot of their resources on marketing campaigns. The bad : The vision With its #WeAreProspects campaign, Walnut positioned itself as the solution to fix the current frustrating SaaS sales process. And it delivers on that promise by letting revenue teams give prospects exactly what they want when they want it. Reprise Another one of the first interactive demo software on the market, came out strong but has struggled with keeping things scalable and user-friendly. The product is mostly split between the ability to showcase the product as an embed and its ability to capture your product for live demos. While its use case can be for companies of all sizes, the pricing mostly lends itself to larger enterprise companies, with the tagline on the website saying it’s for “enterprise sales and marketing teams”. Reprise The good: Reprise offers a good interactive demo for top-of-funnel use and provides users with a lot of control over their guides. For sales demos, with a small amount of R&D help, the final results can be great. The bad: Users have complained a lot about the complicated UX, which makes it difficult to actually achieve the results you need without the help of developers. Likewise, with its focus on enterprise business, the product proves to be less valuable for mid-sized companies and startups. The vision: Reprise brands itself as the solution for storytellers, helping sellers tell the story of their product the way they want to. Demostack Whereas Reprise and Walnut can benefit multiple areas of your go-to-market teams, only targets pre-sales engineers—and does a pretty nice job with it. By easily creating a replica of your SaaS product, Demostack allows reps to present demos that act like the real thing. This can help your team save time and resources building demo environments - but heads up - some market testimonials say that they are frequently pivoting their tech mechanism to find one that is operational, thus creating friction with its customers. Demostack The good: Demostack’s solution is a good option if you want to improve your presales. It takes a very short amount of time to create product replicas, which means a very short time to value. The bad: This solution might be the least innovative of the bunch. That’s because product replicas require sales reps to click through the full product to show prospects each feature, which can lead to a frustrating demo for prospects and a lot of unnecessary feature dumping. Likewise, because only your product is being replicated, you’ll struggle to show prospects how your product integrates with other tech. The vision: Demostack brands itself as the solution for presales teams, helping them spin up demo environments quickly for their sales team. Navattic is a good solution for smaller companies looking to embed a fairly basic product tour on their websites. Unlike the first 2 options on the list, Navattic’s solution only focuses on the top-of-funnel but is less helpful for sales teams. While it is less costly than the others, its capabilities are more limited. Navattic The good: Because they are singularly focused, they offer a very solid solution for marketing teams. They offer a cost-efficient tool that integrates nicely with many other software. The bad: The offering is limited in terms of support and resources and can be prone to bugs. Numerous customers have complained about issues with the technology with some clunky features that don’t always work as they should. Likewise, the result is never fully interactive but acts more like a dynamic screenshot than an actual demo of your product. The vision: Navattic aims to be the leader of the top-of-funnel interactive demo solutions and help SaaS companies better market their products. Storylane An even smaller, top-of-funnel-focused team, offers a similar solution to Navattic. Use it to quickly create some simple interactive guided product tours that you can embed on your website and drive better leads. Storylane The good: The product is fairly easy to use and the packages include customer service and support. This leads to a quick time-to-value. The bad: The offerings are limited to marketing and the solution tends to act like a cheaper and more limited version of some of the other interactive demo software. Also, because it’s the smallest company on this list, they offer a smaller support team. The vision: While they mostly support the top-of-funnel now, they aim to scale their product to be useful to the entire go-to-market team. Consensus recently joined the interactive demo space, after trying to help sellers build and manage video demos for over a decade. They are focused on high-lifting enterprise customers, but most of their clients are still using video demos instead of interactive demos. While they may provide a solid interactive demo solution in the future, at the moment, this offering is quite limited. Consensus The good: The platform has been up and running for over a decade, which can be a good sign of stability, performance, and potentially fewer bugs than its competitors. The bad: This is more of an old-school solution for video products than an innovative demo platform. The vision: Consensus seems to be aiming to step away from its original video product and into interactive demos. Final words Incorporating interactive demo solutions throughout your go-to-market efforts is like having a secret weapon in your arsenal. By simplifying the sales process for your prospects, these solutions provide immense value that goes beyond just showcasing your product. Some of them empower your sales team to deliver personalized experiences, bridge the understanding gap, and build strong connections with potential customers. Others empower your marketing teams to provide site visitors with what they want to see to drive better, stronger leads. And some do all of the above. Interactive demos make complex concepts digestible, allowing prospects to visualize the benefits of your offering firsthand. With their ability to adapt to individual needs and pain points, these demos streamline the sales journey, making it smoother and more engaging. So, if you're looking to supercharge your sales efforts and leave a lasting impression on your prospects, dive into the world of interactive demo solutions and unlock the true potential of your go-to-market strategy.

State of Interactive Product Demo Software: The Good, the Bad, and What’s Behind the Brands

For a long time, I considered the years I spent as a student participating in a popular comedy TV show as wasted time. Although I was working, I couldn't pursue a serious career because my passion for comedy and humor consumed a lot of time and energy. My classmates moved forward in business while I traveled for shoots and performances. Now, looking back, I can say that my career success in the tech sector is largely influenced by the unconventional experience I gained in a creative collective. Let me try to explain what KVN (the name of the show where comedy teams compete) taught me and how my non-business experience helps me in business. Living "in a team and with a team" (the concept of a collective) It may sound cliché, but the ability to live and get along in a team, understand its culture, respect the personal boundaries of its members, and maintain the necessary distance is extremely important for effective leadership. This is especially true in tech companies where a large portion of people are often true introverts. They are brilliant, professional, and talented individuals who simply don't enjoy socialising. I have been told many times that I have achieved significant success in managing challenging teams, and at some point, I realised that I was applying the experience I gained during… tours. Spending several weeks together with the folks in the same space, creating, rehearsing, refining, and performing (and so on in a loop), you quickly learn how to be part of a collective and get along with different people. This skill and knowledge let me to get a long with a variety of colleagues quickly and efficiently. Understanding the concept of a real deadline Each of us has probably missed a work deadline at some point. I don't believe it has never happened to you. Now imagine that in the case of a comedy show, postponing the deadline is physically impossible. Tickets to the audience are sold, your fans have come, cameras and lights are set up—you must perform, and you cannot be unprepared. In other words: "This release must happen." That feeling that the shoot cannot be rescheduled forever instilled in me a sense of discipline, the importance of planning, and a "get s*** done" approach. I think I have been able to convey this level of importance and responsibility for deadlines to my colleagues across the globe precisely because of this experience. Sometimes, I even make a direct association with television production, which cannot be rescheduled or canceled. Brainstorms: Fun creativity vs methodology I think it's no secret that the most successful creative individuals, such as actors, musicians, and artists, may appear "crazy," but they systematically and strategically think about their craft, and the word "business" is just as important to them as "show." On the other hand, people involved in comedy are often quite serious, even gloomy, in real life. Why is that? I was surprised to learn that the process of writing the funniest jokes, sketches, and performances is a serious, structured, and sometimes even quite dull process. Of course, during brainstorming sessions, passing around notes with punchlines and reprises in complete silence, there is room for uncontrollable laughter and joy, but it only accounts for about 20%, while the remaining 80% is serious brain work that requires maximum concentration. Behind every crazy and "easy" creative success lies serious, routine, structured work. This is another example of experience that I apply to leadership. If even humor writing is approached systematically and with a serious face, then systematicity should definitely be present in any business process. Persistence: Mistakes and rewrites For any creative humoristic collective, there is no scarier word than "Editing." Censors, sometimes getting carried away, can leave you practically without a script, sometimes just a day before the performance. This has happened to us more than once: "Something is not funny this time." It's hard to overestimate the resilience, stress resistance, and grit acquired through such experiences. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger—this is definitely about such a situation. Now I truly appreciate this experience because it serves as an excellent example to motivate the team. Not giving up in a difficult situation for business is another skill I acquired in a creative, far from business-like collective. And how much perseverance is required to come back to a tournament after a defeat and elimination... Definitely no less than when starting a new project after the previous one "failed to take off." Perseverance is the key to success. And this obvious business truth was taught to me not by business experience in my student years. Outsourcing vs. In-house The eternal debate of what is better, in-house or outsourcing, for a range of processes? At some stage of business growth, when resources are depleted, every manager asks themselves this question and faces a choice. You won't believe it, but it turns out I have already encountered this task... while engaging in humor. The thing is, the foundation of success and the main resource of any humoristic collective are its authors (scriptwriters). And during "hyper growth," for example, when your team suddenly enters a higher league by winning a competition, this resource may not be sufficient. That's when the "humor market" offers external, hired authors who can be attracted for outsourcing. Like in regular business, I had different experiences working with such outsourcers; I will just say that I learned many lessons and mastered the rule of balance, excuse me for stating the obvious. The balance between outsourcing and in-house is the key to profitable growth and success. It's hard to believe, but I discovered this long before becoming an executive manager in a tech company, all within the same creative collective. Networking with Competitors: It's Normal Often, we avoid and even fear our competitors. However, as practice shows, healthy networking with competitors is beneficial. Many years ago, I was inspired by this idea, thanks to the very same KVN (comedy show). Imagine that during preparations for competitions, during editing and performances, almost all participating teams spend a lot of time together. At some point, you stop treating other folks as your competitors whom you need to outsmart intellectually and artistically in a couple days. Often, interacting with other creative collectives gave rise to great ideas and sometimes synergistic collaborations. The ability not to fear or avoid competitors but to engage in a unique form of careful networking with them also came to me when I was involved in comedy during my student years. Fundraising Yes, as strange as it may sound, I was involved in full-fledged fundraising back in university when I sought sponsors for our team. The thing is, besides being an actor and author, I was also the director of the collective. Tours, costumes, props, and engaging external (outsourced) authors (sometimes it was simply impossible without them)—all of these required substantial funding. So armed with a pitch and presentation, I demonstrated the positive impact that our humoristic collective appearing on television had for the university. The impact, by the way, was real. During admissions interviews, prospective students often mentioned choosing our university because it had a popular KVN team at that time. Back then, I didn't understand, but later I realised that I managed to "raise the money" and “close some rounds“ several times with the help of a some kind of peculiar “elevator pitch”. Final Thoughts Sometimes, seemingly non-obvious experiences can be applied in extremely useful ways if you listen and understand what this non-obvious and strange experience has given you. And how you can apply it. Don't be afraid of the non-obvious, unrelated, creative experience—it can turn out to be very valuable. Have you ever had the experience of applying skills acquired in an interesting and unusual way in business? Share in the comments. And if you like the article, I'm ready to share other examples of non-obvious experience and its application in leadership.

How Non-business, Creative Skills and Experience Can Help With Leadership

The Terminator (Sega Mega-CD) Review

The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language Word-Study: Chapter III 

Photo by on Adam Nir Unsplash U.S. Senator and National Monetary Commission chairman Nelson Aldrich. “[T]he study of monetary questions is one of the great causes of insanity." – Introduction Money Money is a technology designed to facilitate commerce and investment. Money was primarily , not economists, although first definitively defined by that great economist . developed by scientists William Stanley Jevons Economists study money.  Scientists defined and engineered it. When the notorious Scottish economist John Law meddled in French monetary policy, he infamously muddled it, destroying France financially. What is Money? summarizes the consensus well: Wikipedia “In Money and the Mechanism of Exchange (1875), famously analyzed money in terms of four functions: a , a common measure of value (or ), a standard of value (or ), and a . By 1919, Jevons's four functions of money were summarized in the : William Stanley Jevons medium of exchange unit of account standard of deferred payment store of value couplet Money's a matter of functions four, A Medium, a Measure, a Standard, a Store. “This couplet would later become widely popular in macroeconomics textbooks. Most modern textbooks now list only three functions, that of the , , and .” medium of exchange unit of account store of value Not for nothing did U.S. Senator Nelson Aldrich -- while reporting, in 1909, on the observations of his National Monetary Commission, in a of New York-- archly quote McLeod to the effect that: speech before the Economic Club "the study of monetary questions is one of the great causes of insanity." This was almost certainly a swipe at free silver demagogue and presidential candidate William Jennings “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold” Bryan. Yet perhaps Sen. Aldrich was prophesying my good friends, Gerard Daché, the founder and executive director of the Government Blockchain Association and Professor Jim Liew, of Johns Hopkins University. And me…. Not so incidentally, let us recall quantum physicist Niels Bohr’s comment to Wolfgang Pauli: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.” As it happens, money has a sterling scientific provenance. Ralph Benko addressing a gathering of the Government Blockchain Association January 27, 2022, National Press Club, Washington, DC.  Photo by Jim Liew. Money’s Provenance Copernicus Money's modern scientific provenance goes back at least to Nicholas Copernicus, the very same savant who persuaded the Earth to orbit the Sun instead of the Sun orbiting the Earth as previously believed. In 1526, yes, nearly 500 years ago, Copernicus wrote a brilliant treatise . It was my arcane privilege to serve as the lead co-editor of what may be its most esteemed modern translation. On the Minting of Money Copernicus warned: “ALTHOUGH THERE ARE COUNTLESS MALADIES that are forever causing the decline of kingdoms, princedoms, and republics, the following four (in my judgment) are the most serious: civil discord, a high death rate, sterility of the soil, and the debasement of the coinage. The first three are so obvious that everybody recognizes the damage they cause; but the fourth one, which has to do with money, is noticed by only a few very thoughtful people, since it does not operate all at once and at a single blow, but gradually overthrows governments and in a hidden, insidious way.” He went on to observe: “Money, or ‘coinage,’ is gold or silver that has been specially marked — in accordance with policy established by any government or head of government — for the purpose of reckoning the prices of things that are bought and sold. “Money is therefore a kind of common “measuring stick” for the valuation of things. Now, whatever is taken as a measure has to be stable — must keep to a fixed limit. Otherwise, public order will necessarily be disturbed, and the buyers and sellers of things will be cheated many times over, just as if basic measures of length [Latin ulna, or ell], bulk measure [Latin modius, or peck], or weight did not have a fixed quantity. “Now, I think that the relevant measure here is the valuation [Latin aestimatio] of the money as such, and, although this is founded in the quality of the metal it is made of, nevertheless, money’s material or metallic value [Latin valor] must be distinguished from its valuation as money [aestimatio]; for money can be valued more in itself than the material it is composed of and vice versa [i.e., its material value may be more than its actual valuation]. “It is necessary for money to be established: even though exchange could also take place simply by weights of gold or silver alone (since, by universal human consent, gold and silver are everywhere highly valued). “Nevertheless, money is needed for two reasons: first, because of the inconvenience of always having to carry around heavy weights of metal, and second, because the real value of the metals is not easily grasped by everyone at a glance. Thus it has become customary to mark money with a public seal, by means of which the proper amount of gold or silver is indicated as present in each coin, and that the public authority is to be trusted in this. … “The [material] value of money is lessened in many ways: either through defect of material alone, namely, when more bronze is mixed with silver than is right for that particular weight of coin; or through the loss of [total] weight of the coin, even though the proportion of bronze to silver is correct; or (and this is the worst case) through both of these defects occurring at the same time; finally, the value can just diminish on its own through usage, over a long passage of time, and this is the only reason for making new money. “The evidence of this happening is, if the silver in the money is found to be significantly less than what can be bought with it — and this is rightly considered debasement [or poverty: Latin penuria] of the currency.” The Prussian nobles who Copernicus was addressing did not heed his wise advice. They eventually suffered the fate he predicted. Newton In addition to observing an apple’s fall and founding modern physics, Sir Isaac Newton served, professionally, as the Master of the Royal Mint of Great Britain toward the end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th century. Per the itself: Royal Mint “When Sir Isaac Newton came to the Royal Mint Britain’s finances were approaching crisis, with up to one in ten circulating coins believed to be forged.  His vision of matchless quality led him to root out and prosecute notorious counterfeiters, improve assaying techniques (the way coin quality is checked), and refine weights and measures to standards never seen before. “In 1699 Newton became Master of the Mint. After overseeing the new coinage for the accession of Queen Anne in 1702 he also supervised the huge task of bringing Scottish coinage into line with English coinage, following the Union of England and Scotland in 1707. Thanks to Newton’s vision, Royal Mint coins remain unrivaled in their accuracy and purity to this day.” How great a figure was Newton? Just for a moment, consider , delivered posthumously by his brother, Geoffrey, singing the praises of Newton in the 1940’s. the last words of the first celebrity economist, John Maynard Keynes ”Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.” And per : Christianity Today “Even in Newton’s lifetime, his contemporaries’ adulation verged on worship. Following his death in April 1727, Newton lay in state in Westminster Abbey for a week. At the funeral, his pall was borne by three earls, two dukes, and the Lord Chancellor. Voltaire observed, “He was buried like a king who had done well by his subjects.” “No scientist before or since has been so revered and interred with such high honor. “Who was this man whose stature has dominated the scientific landscape for three centuries? Why did his achievements have such an impact on society? What role did Newton’s faith play in his life and work? … “For Newton the world of science was by no means the whole of life. He spent more time on theology than on science; indeed, he wrote about 1.3 million words on biblical subjects. Yet this vast legacy lay hidden from public view for two centuries until the auction of his nonscientific writings in 1936. “Newton’s understanding of God came primarily from the Bible, which he studied for days and weeks at a time. He took a special interest in miracles and prophecy, calculating dates of Old Testament books and analyzing their texts to discover their authorship. In a manuscript on rules for interpreting prophecy, Newton noted the similar goals of the scientist and the prophecy expositor: simplicity and unity.” Although the Sermon on the Mountain contains an aphorism holding that you cannot serve both God and money, Newton proves a clear exception to that rule. What was Newton’s Monetary Legacy? A happy accident by Newton led to the gold standard, a monetary system which helped Great Britain prosper, proving instrumental in Britain’s becoming a dominant world power. : Wikipedia ”Great Britain accidentally adopted a de facto gold standard in 1717 when Sir__ __, then-master of the , set the exchange rate of silver to gold too low, thus causing silver coins to go out of circulation. Isaac Newton Royal Mint “A formal gold specie standard was first established in 1821, when adopted it following the introduction of the by the new Royal Mint at in 1816. Britain gold sovereign Tower Hill “As Great Britain became the world's leading financial and commercial power in the 19th century, other states increasingly adopted Britain's monetary system. … “The gold specie standard came to an end in the United Kingdom and the rest of the British Empire with the outbreak of .” World War I Contemporaneously with Newton, John Law, a Scottish economist, introduced (what some today call “fiat”) in France. This led to a speculative bubble, horrendous inflation, and both France's and Law's financial ruin. a paper money standard Per : Wikipedia “[Law] served as Controller General of Finances under the , who was regent for the juvenile . In 1716, Law set up a private in France. A year later it was nationalized at his request and renamed as . … Duke of Orleans Louis XV of France Banque Générale Banque Royale “Law also set up and directed the , funded by the Banque Royale. Its chaotic collapse has been compared to the 17th-century in Holland. The Mississippi bubble coincided with the in England, which allegedly took ideas from it. Law as a would win card games by mentally calculating …. The term " " was coined for beneficiaries of Law's scheme. Mississippi Company tulip mania South Sea bubble gambler odds millionaire … “Speculation gave way to panic as people flooded the market with future shares trading as high as 15,000 livres per share, while the shares themselves remained at 10,000 livres each. “By May 1720, prices fell to 4,000 livres per share, a 73 per cent decrease within a year. The rush to convert paper money to coins led to sporadic bank hours and riots… The descent of a relatively unknown man came as fast as his rise, leaving an economic power vacuum. Law's theories live on 300 years later and ‘captured many key conceptual points which are very much a part of modern monetary theorizing.’" Priestley Fast forward again, now toward the mid-to-late 1700s. One of the first great chemists, Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen and the inventor of carbonation (an invention upon which our soft-drink industry is based) wrote extensively and eruditely on the gold standard, providing an extensive lecture on the mechanics of money later published in his y (1793). Lectures on History and General Philosoph Per : Wikipedia “Lectures on History and General Policy (1788) is the published version of a set of lectures on history and government given by the 18th-century British to the students of . polymath Joseph Priestley Warrington Academy “The Lectures cover an array of topics—"forms of government, the feudal system, the rise of corporations, law, agriculture, commerce, the arts, finance and taxation, colonies, manners, population, war and peace"—demonstrating how all-encompassing Priestley believed the study of history to be. “Priestley offers a version of history in which all events are ‘an exhibition of the ways of God.’ Studying history and nature, according to Priestley, ‘leads us to the knowledge of his perfections and of his will.’ Understanding history thus allows one to comprehend the natural laws God established and the perfection towards which they allow the world to tend. This outlook is tied together with Priestley's belief in scientific progress and the improvement of the human race.’” millennial Stornetta and Haber The author taking a snapshot of Dr. Stornetta and Congressional blockchain thought leader Lizzy Fallon, Capitol Hill, January 10, 2022. Photo by Jim Liew. Fast forward yet again, to the late 20th century. In 1991, Dr. W. Scott Stornetta, together with Dr. Stuart Haber, published . This was the breakthrough that is the blockchain, cited three times (out of eight citations) in Satoshi's white paper. How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document Per , Coingeek " Working at Bellcore Labs in the 1990s, scientists Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta were allowed to pick their own research projects. For Scott, a problem worth solving was the authentication of digital documents: how could you be sure the version you were looking at had not been altered from its original? “The two worked as a team and were on the point of proving to themselves that the question of trust made the problem insoluble: there always needed to be some independent person or body to verify authenticity—but what if they were also part of a collusion? But then, Scott says, as he was waiting to go into a restaurant (author’s note, as he told me, a Friendly’s) with his family, he had a brainwave. “If you needed to keep adding extra trusted parties to vouch for the honesty of the existing players, then, logically, the list would expand infinitely until the whole world was required. And that still wouldn’t be enough. Scott’s insight was, as he explains it, ‘I realised that if you turn that upside down and created a system of interlinked documents with essentially everyone as a witness, then you had, in fact, solved the problem.’” Behold the seed of cryptocurrency, the money of the future. Conclusion And there you have a potted history of the scientists who invented money as we knew it and know it today: Copernicus, Newton, Priestley. And the secret origin story of future money by scientists: Stornetta and Haber. I have treated you to the scientific provenance of the key makers of money, with brief detours to the distinguished monetary economist Jevons, a passing reference to the first celebrity economist, John Maynard Keynes, and a revelation of the notorious economist John Law, proponent of promiscuously issued paper money with its attendant catastrophic debasement. And here we are today at the Government Blockchain Association's . Future of Money, Governance and the Law Contemplating the contributions of five distinguished scientists, coupled with brief forays to three influential economists, gives us insight into the potential future of money, governance and the law. What possibilities for greater prosperity, equity and financial stability does the blockchain create? So glad you asked. Let us reprise the view of the great discoverer of oxygen who offers: “A version of history in which all events are ‘an exhibition of the ways of God;’ studying history and nature, according to Priestley, to lead “us to the knowledge of [God’s] perfections and of [God’s] will." Let us reprise the quest of the great Newton, who sought, both as to prophecy and science, simplicity and unity. What possibilities does the blockchain create? Welcome. You’ve come to the right place. Adapted from at the Government Blockchain Association’s the National Press Club January 27, 2022. remarks presented The Future of Money, Governance and the Law, Dedicated to Ellen Stevens, editor extraordinaire.

A Brief History of Money

Super Heroes have never been more popular and profitable than they ever have. Whether from Marvel, DC, or somewhere else, it’s never been a better time to be a Super Hero fan. Luckily, some of the best Super Heroes of all time have also been part of the very best that the gaming industry has to offer. Spider-Man, Batman: Arkham City, Injustice, Marvel Ultimate Alliance, the list goes on and on. While some heroes have been given the light of day, some are still stuck in the shadows, praying when they can get the game that they deserve. These are just some of the heroes that deserve their own game. Even if they’ve co-starred with other heroes or starred in a forgotten gem, it’s about time they get the game that does them justice in today’s age. 1. The Punisher Frank Castle has had an interesting life in the gaming world. He starred in a few titles back in the early ‘90s and even had a pretty decent movie game that saw Thomas Jane reprise his role from the 2004 flick. After a god-awful Multiplayer game on the PS3, he has stuck to the sidelines as a playable character in games like Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 and a few mobile titles. The Punisher can be an easy character to adapt, but you either need to have an over-the-top bloodbath game or a gritty-noir story to do the character justice. We can easily see studios like Naughty Dog, for its grounded storytelling in The Last of Us, Machine Games, for its delightfully violent Wolfenstein games, or Remedy Entertainment, for basically making a Punisher game called Max Payne, taking on a project like this. 2. Wonder Woman Wonder Woman has been featured in many games that starred the Justice League, but not so much as her own solo adventure. With Gal Gadot bringing the heroine to life on the big screen, you’d think that people would want to play an action-adventure game starring Comic’s First Lady. Warner Brothers have plenty of studios under its belt, with Shadow of Mordor developer Monolith being the perfect devs to bring her first digital adventure to life. Who doesn’t want to see Wonder Woman stabbing and chopping heads off in an M-rated action game? 3. Black Panther It’s hard to put into words how much of an impact Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther had on the entertainment industry. While Marvel has had a few black Super Heroes, none have become as iconic as Prince T’challa. He’s become a symbol of black empowerment and has starred in the highest-grossing solo superhero movie. While he’s made appearances in Marvel’s Avengers and Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite, it’s about time we see the industry give him his own solo adventure. Marvel’s Avengers had some elements to make a Black Panther game, but they were never fully realized so that the developers could make another expansion for the live-service experiment. If given a chance, Crystal Dynamics could knock a Black Panther game out of the park. 4. Batman Beyond Batman is no stranger to the Gaming Industry, with the Arkham series being one of the most iconic Super Hero franchises. Though his sidekicks will be taking the stage in the upcoming Gotham Knights, his future successor hasn’t had the best luck. Batman Beyond has plenty of potential for a brand new take on Terry McGuiness and his relationship with a retired Bruce Wayne. The younger version of Batman needs at least one good game under his belt, especially after that awful Return of the Joker game. Even if it’s not Rocksteady, we can see WB Montréal create a digital version of Neo-Gotham. 5. Jessica Jones There have been plenty of detective games, but few with a grounded, Super Hero protagonist. Jessica Jones is the ultimate private eye of the Marvel Universe. She has immense strength, but rather than go up against alien threats, she keeps things grounded and investigates the dirty underbellies of the Marvel universe. This could allow for some intriguing, crime-solving gameplay, similar to games like LA Noir or Judgement. While Luke Cage, Iron Fist, and Daredevil have had their moments as playable characters, Jessica Jones could benefit the most of all the Defenders. 6. Captain America Captain America has been no stranger to the gaming world, but few have put him at the center stage. Those that have done so have been less than exciting, ranging from generic 2-D Beat’em ups or licensed-tie-ins. His last game, Captain America: Super Soldier, had a lot of potential but was ultimately wasted so it could coincide with the 2011 flick. If given another chance for a similar Prince of Persia meets Arkham Asylum style of game, Steve Rogers could knock it out of the park. But if they feel like Rogers is too played out, there’s always the chance of bringing his recent replacement, Sam Wilson. 7. Black Widow Spy games were all the rage back in the late ‘90s and throughout the 2000s. Splinter Cell, Metal Gear, and Perfect Dark were just some of the biggest names in the spy genre, but we haven’t seen much of them in the AAA scene. What better way to bring it back than having the most famous super spy around, Black Widow? The game could take inspiration from Splinter Cell Blacklist and allow players to customize the way they play. Or, we could see an action RPG from Obsidian, similar to the cult hit, Alpha Protocol. The possibilities are never-ending. 8. Blade Before Black Panther, Spider-Man, X-Men, and The Avengers made it to the big screen, Blade was the character that helped prove that Marvel movies could be entertaining and violent. While he’s headlined a few games, they were the typical licensed movie tie-in garbage. With the character set to make his MCU debut, it is a perfect time to make a Blade video game that does him justice. Blade is a snarky, one-line throwing bad-ass that wields a sword and guns. While Capcom creating it might be a stretch, we can see Ninja Theory, who developed DMC: Devil May Cry and Heavenly Sword, taking on the mantle. Conclusion With Marvel’s Guardian’s of the Galaxy coming out next month and Gotham Knights out next year, we’re slowly starting to see the big two comic book companies finally take some risks in the gaming industry. No one would’ve guessed the Avengers would ever assemble in gaming or expected that Batman starred some of the best games of all time. Now that Marvel and DC have made their marks in the gaming space, they’ll both need to take more risks if they want to stay on top.

5 Super Heroes Who Need their Own Game

Wikipedia Sucks: There's a Solution by Wiki’s Real Daddy

Payroll taxes are in the news. President Donald Trump said he wanted to defer the collection of employee portion of the Social Security portion of the payroll tax in order to provide pandemic-related economic relief to workers. The Congress didn’t agree, so he issued an executive order to do just that on August 13. , and there are questions about whether it is legal. Much is unclear about how his order is supposed to work All this prompts me to reprise an article I wrote in May 2017, . At the time, Trump had been in office a few months, both houses of Congress was controlled by Republicans, and income tax cuts were on the agenda. Reduced Employer Payroll Taxes: A Direct Path to Job Creation The G.O.P. was arguing that one would spur job creation, and enough growth to pay for itself. That is, the drop in tax collections resulting from lower tax rates would be offset by an increase in collections due to greater economic activity. Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin went further, suggesting that this could happen enough to . the deficit reduce When Trump signed the into law, he predicted it would cause the economy to grow 6 percent per year, but growth was merely . Larry Kudlow, Director of the National Economic Council, envisioned an “investment boom,” but business investment grew modestly for just two quarters, then it dropped below what it had been before the tax cut. Tax Cuts and Jobs Act 2.2% in 2017, 3.2% in 2018, and 2.3% in 2019 The new law was proved to be a bad bet; it provided little benefit to most people, and substantially increased the deficit. The Congressional Budget Office projects debt held by the public will rise from —higher than any point since just after World War II. 81% of GDP in 2020 to 98% of GDP by 2030 In my 2017 article (and now), I argue that if the goal was job creation, it makes more sense to reduce the employer share of payroll taxes than to reduce income taxes. [Note: A 12.4% federal payroll tax funds Social Security and Medicare. About half the tax is paid by employees via payroll withholdings—the employer pays the rest. Self-employed individuals pay both portions.] Trump’s executive order provides temporary benefit for employ ; it defers their payment of their post-order 2020 payroll taxes until 2021. In contrast, I propose a permanent reduction in taxes employ pay when they employ someone. ees ers Here is how they compare. Half of that—$600 billion—was paid by employers. How do I propose to pay for a reduction in employer payroll taxes? In 2019, $1.2 trillion was collected in total payroll taxes. A combination of two new taxes: A transaction tax on the of equity securities—the transfer of stock from one shareholder to another. To be clear, that excludes new stock sold . That is, no tax when a company raises capital, only when the subsequent ownership of its stock changes. The World Bank reports that in equity securities were traded in 2019, and that 38 percent of that—$23 trillion—was traded in the U.S. That indicates that a 1 percent transaction tax in would have generated $230 billion in 2019, enough to cut the employer payroll tax by 38 percent.  A 1% tariff on imported goods could paydown the employer payroll tax by another 4%. The Department of Commerce estimates the value of imported goods in 2019 at ; a 1% tariff would have generated $25 billion. non-original sale by a company $60 trillion $2.5 trillion The World Bank figure on stock trading excludes private market sales between investors, as well as acquisitions. A one percent tax on the value shareholders receive on those transactions by U.S. shareholders could reduce the employer payroll tax further than 42.5 percent. Alternatively, it could be used to reduce the burden of Social Security obligations on the future workforce, or to help reduce student loan debt. The overarching rationale for my proposal is that the U.S. economy is transitioning from a world in which it was the unquestionable dominant player, to one where it is less so. By making it less expensive for companies to create or preserve domestic jobs, my proposal makes U.S. labor more competitive without reducing pay or benefits. That buffers the effect of three trends that have eroded the prospects for U.S. workers over recent decades: It has made it easier to move work. Initially, within a workplace, then outside a company; eventually, to anywhere in the world. TECHNOLOGY The idea that management's principal job is to maximize shareholder wealth emerged in the 1970s and gained traction in the 1980s. A derivative economic theory is that companies should focus on their core competencies and outsource the rest. Together, they led work to be moved to lower cost locations; first from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt, then to other countries. ECONOMIC THEORY The end of the Cold War encouraged inward-looking countries to adopt an export mentality. That enlarged the supply of labor available to perform work that might have otherwise been performed in developed economies. LARGER SUPPLY OF LABOR. These trends bolstered returns on investment and so, those whose wealth is largely derived from the return on capital have done well. On the other hand, these trends weaken the return on labor—the existence of good jobs, with appealing prospects for advancement. The result is that people who rely on the return on labor are increasingly anxious, and less optimistic about the future. How can the U.S. improve the return on labor? It will take time to develop and implement ideas. Absent progress, pressure will mount on the economic theories that guide corporate decisions. That’s the situation we are in. One thing, however, is clear today. The payroll tax structure creates disincentive for employers to have U.S. workers. For labor-intensive companies that are unprofitable or marginally profitable, it makes it harder to survive, let alone thrive. For all companies, it makes it tempting to offshore work or automate it, and to import goods rather than build them, or buy them from domestic manufacturers. A lower employer payroll tax can abate that. A tariff reduces the advantage of workforces with low wage rates, and/or weak labor and environmental standards. From a competitive standpoint, it might only be sustainable for a decade. Nonetheless, it can help ease pressing needs while the economy is in transition. A transaction tax on the resale of securities is more controversial. It will cause some to gag—but it makes sense because: The U.S. has competitive advantage in capital markets. It is due to investor confidence, which largely flows from respected and enforced legal and accounting practices, as well as established institutions. A transaction tax contributes a return on the societal investment that maintains that investor-friendly environment. The risk that a transaction tax will lead much stock trading to move offshore seems slight. A parallel may be the “sin taxes”—high taxes on tobacco and alcohol products; they have less effect on sales than one might expect. de minimis Stock trading does not create value—a stock that changes ownership multiple times a month is not inherently worth more than one that does not. Value creation comes from the design, manufacture, and distribution of products and services—the type of activity that a reduction in employer payroll taxes encourages. A tax on stock trades help ease a real problem—the relative cost of U.S. employees— without creating a comparable problem in the capital markets.

Why We Should Pay for Payroll Taxes via a Transaction Tax on Stocks and Tariffs on Imports

It is arguable that in 2020 the entire world stands at a crossroads, and that therefore cryptocurrency has also reached some kind of turning point. Of course, at a crossroads there is a choice of directions, and right now nearly every economy in the world is spinning in the centre wondering which road to take into the future. What seems certain to many is that the road already travelled may not be the best choice to get economies back on track. Even before most countries had gone into lockdown, we watched stock markets crash and the oil price collapse. Only a few months later, as a result of businesses being closed due to the measures taken to contain the virus, there is a vast number of people globally who have been left without employment to return to. The virus has nuked the hospitality and tourism industries, many shutting their doors and filing for bankruptcy. The blockchain sector has not been immune to the challenges of Covid-19, and we have watched as the price of the leading cryptocurrencies has risen and fallen, echoing the state of traditional share prices. It certainly made some pause to re-evaluate crypto as a safe investment, especially when in less than a week after the first reports of coronavirus cases in China came out, the cryptocurrency market collapsed by almost 50%. However, that certainly wasn’t the end of its Covid-19 story How Did We Get Here? A Decade of Crypto writing for Finance Magnates reprises the history of cryptocurrencies in her analysis of how digital assets have got to where they are now, and it would be pointless to recap it again here, as she has followed the timeline so well, including the proliferation of altcoins – the name stemming from them being an ‘alternative’ to Bitcoin, if you didn’t realise that already. Amy Day As Day points out, it has only taken a decade for cryptocurrencies to arrive at their current position, and there has been an enormous amount of activity along the way.  She says, “In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic and economic recession, it may seem that cryptocurrencies were designed for the entirely new world that we are witnessing now.” The pandemic has encouraged the idea of a cash-free society, as the virus can be transferred on paper notes and metal coinage. There is also some movement away from currencies that are tied to traditional assets, such as oil. Furthermore, there is a move towards decentralisation on the work front, with working from home suddenly emerging as a winning strategy during the lockdown. And the cryptocurrency market displayed a substantial recovery after its initial plunge in February. Day points to research by the deVere group that shows Europe experienced a 72% surge in fintech app use fuelled by the lockdown. Travelling in a Blockchain Direction It’s also timely to point out that blockchain isn’t just about cryptocurrency. The pandemic has highlighted its other uses, such as vaccine development and medical supply delivery. Other factors supporting blockchain and suggesting it is may be the best answer for many sectors in a post-Covid world, is the emergence of Web 3.0, which will by default encourage crypto adoption due to new browsers, such as Opera, that support BTC and ETH, and can also make crypto wallets more accessible to regular users who are not tech-savvy, thereby, expanding the crypto community. Then there is the DeFi market, which crossed the $1-billion mark at the beginning of 2020. As Day says, “Even space exploration can benefit from the use of the blockchain system.” It seems inevitable that blockchain technology in its many forms is the way forward, and that at the crossroads where the world stands now, blockchain and cryptocurrency is signposting the way to our future. However, as Day concludes, “Our task is to embrace these changes and spread awareness of how this technology and movement can improve our lives.”

Is Crypto At Crossroads?

Yie old Reliable Data Structures and Their Controversial (Read) Access. Using objects as data structures is an established practice that generates many problems associated with the maintainability and evolution of software. It misuses brilliant concepts that were stated five decades ago. In this second part we will reflect on the reading access of these objects. In the first part of this article, we showed the transition from hidden information in data structures towards living objects responsibilities (the essential ) hiding the implementation (the accidental ). what how Nude Models - Part I : Setters In this second part, we will show the drawbacks of using . getters The name that does not exist in real world (Reprise) Programmers conventionally use the names of the form to expose (and lose control of) a previously private attribute. Due to the same arguments stated on setter’s article , this name cannot be to a real-world equivalent through . getAttribute…() mapped bijection The final conclusion regarding these names is: There should never be methods of the form setAttribute…() or getAttribute…() Do not expose collections Many objects manage collections. The contents management, the invariants or the traversal method should be the of these objects. sole responsibility Suppose we want to draw the polygon presented on Part I on a canvas. We will achieve it with the following code: $triangle = Polygon([( Point( , ), Point( , ), Point( , ))]);
  $lastPoint = $triangle->getVertices()->last(); ($triangle->getVertices() $vertex){
    $canvas->drawLine($vertex, $lastPoint);
    $lastPoint = $vertex; 
  } new new 1 1 new 2 2 new 3 3 foreach as By exposing the vertices collection (and since collections are in most languages) we lose control over that collection. passed by reference Nothing prevents this other code from running: $triangle = Polygon([( Point( , ), Point( , ), Point( , ))]);
  array_shift($triangle->getVertices()); new new 1 1 new 2 2 new 3 3 array_shift () removes the first value from the array This causes the triangle to mutate, generating an inconsistency in real world . Two-sided polygons would violate the principle of being a closed figure. bijection This defect will be noticed a long time later because it has not been detected in time, thus violating the fail fast principle. Fail Fast Philosophy, Explained In no case shall such objects expose their collections, thus enforcing Demeter’s law. In case you need to return the collected elements, you should answer with a copy ( ) to avoid losing control. With the current state of the art, copying collections is extremely fast. If they were very large collections, there are design solutions with iterators, proxies and cursors to avoid performing the full copy operation. shallow Iterating collections How do we solve the polygon draw operation ? is a well-known topic when working with design patterns: Iterating a collection If we want to go around our polygon, we can return an iterator (indicating we need to do) without revealing our underlying data structure ( we traverse it). what how { ArrayIterator( ->vertices);
    } public : function iterator () Iterator return new $this In case of languages supporting or , we could take the responsibility of iterating elements without exposing an iterator outwards: anonymous functions closures { ( ->vertices $vertex) {
      $$function($vertex);
    } 
  } public function verticesDo ($function) foreach $this as Mutating collections Polygons must not mutate because vertices are part of their minimal : if we remove any of their vertices, they are no longer that polygon that makes them . essence unique There are many business objects that can mutate in their accidental collections and there are mechanisms to manage such mutations. If we wanted to model a account and keep its followers, knowing the business rules, the account is created without followers. Twitter let’s ignore the suggestions that it offers us when creating the new account. { $followers; { ->followers = [];
    }
  } final class TwitterAccount private private function __construct () $this Using and , a novice programmer would be tempted to add a follower in this way: setters getters $mcsee1 = TwitterAccount( );
  $pontifex = TwitterAccount( );
  $mcsee1->getFollowers()[] = $pontifex; new 'mcsee1' new 'pontifex' A correct responsibility assignment guided by business rules suggests that it is the account’s responsibility to add a new follower, carry out validations (for example, that it is was not followed previously) and keep collection integrity. Therefore, a better solution would be: $mcsee1 = TwitterAccount( );
$pontifex = TwitterAccount( );
$mcsee1->addFollower($pontifex); new 'mcsee1' new 'pontifex' Double encapsulation In the 90s there was a tendency to create a of attributes as an extreme approach on privacy. This means that, even from the private methods of an object, direct access to variables would be avoided. double encapsulation This practice does not generate any benefits. Adds unnecessary indirection, and expose setters and getters in languages ​​that have no distinction between and methods. public private In addition, it hides the between an attribute and the direct methods that reference it, avoiding possible refactorings. coupling Coupling: The One and Only Software Designing Problem Tell, don’t ask There is a that states: principle Don’t ask for the information you need to get the job done; ask the object that has the information to do the work for you This principle is known as: . Tell, don’t ask It reminds us that, instead of requesting from an object and acting on this data, we should tell an object to do. This encourages movement of along with the that the object is responsible for managing. data what behavior knowledge Too much information can kill us Paraphrasing Demeter’s Law and minimum coupling and maximum cohesion laws: Each unit should have limited knowledge of others  and only know those units closely related to itself. Each unit should speak only to its friends and not speak to strangers. Just talk to your immediate friends. Adding complexity with and implies generating coupling, violating these rules and generating a greater ripple effect in case of possible changes. accidental setters getters Photo by Macau Photo Agency on Unsplash Setters and getters violate anthropomorphism Let’s go back to our only design rule that asks for a between the model we are building and the real world and respecting the principle of (giving a living entity to each object). bijection Anthropomorphism The One and Only Software Design Principle In doing so, we will discover that the we give to objects after they have been returned with a do not with the real world violating . responsibilities getter map bijection On this there is an excellent example of disrespected anthropomorphism when using . page getters Changing the way we think When we start to model our objects forgetting about their representation, we will be able to avoid (which only fulfill the function of saving data, resulting in a well-known ). accidental anemic classes anti-pattern As with data structures, there is no way for an anemic class to guarantee the integrity of your data and relationships. Since operations on anemic classes are of anemic classes boundaries there is no . Therefore, we will generate both and access points to these attributes that exist in our model. We will always pursue to emulate the behavior of objects like , getting much more realistic and declarative bijections. outside single point of control repeated code black boxes Recommendations Do not use . There are no well-reasoned reasons for doing so. setters Don’t use . In case any of the responsibilities of an object is related to responding to a message matching an attribute, do it thinking beforehand if we are not getters breaking the encapsulation. Never prefix the function name with the word get. If a polygon in the real world can answer what its vertices are, be it with the real world name ( ). vertices() In case of returning collections, return a or a so as not to lose control and favor the use of iterators. copy proxy Have no attributes. For practical purposes it is like having and . It is also a of anemic objects. public setters getters code smell Have no attributes. In addition to what is listed above the classes should be stateless and this is a code smell indicating that a class is being used as a global variable. public static Singleton Pattern: The Root of All Evil Transition from a legacy code system Not all is bad news. Converting a bad model into a good one is possible through a correct and with the help of the appropriate refactors. responsibilities reassignment, If we have the opportunity of improving a system with , we can gradually encapsulate the objects, restricting their access in an good coverage incremental iterative way. In case of not having enough coverage we will be in front of a according to the excellent definition of : legacy code system Michael Feathers A legacy code system is one that has no coverage. Should this be the case, we must the existing functionality, and then we can carry out the necessary transformations. first cover There's an example addressing this problem here: How to Decouple a Legacy System Photo by Greg Nunes on Unsplash Conclusions The well established practice of using and generates and prevents the of our computer systems. setters getters coupling incremental evolution According to the arguments stated in this article, we should restrict their use as much as possible. Part of the objective of this series of articles is to generate spaces for debate and discussion on software design. We look forward to comments and suggestions on this article.

Nude Models - Part II : Getters

The New Zealand Supreme Court has declined Kim Dotcom's appeal in his bid to access private communications captured illegally by the country's spy agency. Dotcom will still be entitled to damages for the unlawful intrusion into his private life but he says this matter is not about money. Instead, he seeks to hold the GCSB agency accountable for its illegal behavior, for the benefit of all New Zealanders. In the weeks and months leading up to and beyond the 2012 raid on Kim Dotcom and his former associates, the Megaupload founder was being spied on by the authorities in New Zealand. Between December 2011 and March 2012, the highly secretive Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) spy agency listened in on the private communications of Kim and former wife Mona Dotcom, plus Megaupload co-defendant Bram van der Kolk. Given the US-instigated investigation into Dotcom and Megaupload, this type of eavesdropping may seem little out of the ordinary. However, GCSB’s powers are limited by law, including that it may not conduct surveillance on New Zealand citizens or permanent residents. Since Dotcom is a permanent resident, that made the spying illegal. Ever since the authorities accepted that potential evidence had been illegally obtained, the Megaupload founder has put considerable effort into finding out exactly what was captured by the GCSB. At every turn, however, he has been declined access to the material. In 2017, for example, the High Court Dotcom’s request, claiming that the release of the intercepted communications would undermine national security. Overall, the ruling added, withholding the information would be in the public interest, even if that was at the expense of Dotcom’s rights. rejected Predictably, Dotcom refused to back down, immediately taking the matter to the Court of Appeal. Unfortunately for him, the result was the same. While accepting that the intercepted communications are “relevant” and could be “put to use”, in a 2019 ruling the Court that Dotcom’s right to access the information was outweighed by national security concerns. determined With the Supreme Court the only avenue left for Dotcom, an appeal was subsequently filed there. In a written judgment published today, the Supreme Court sided with the decisions of the lower courts and refused to hear the appeal. “We are not satisfied that it is necessary in the interests of justice to hear the proposed appeal. While there may be questions arising about the scope and application of s 70 of the Evidence Act, the present case is not the appropriate case to consider those issues,” the panel of three judges writes. “No question of principle arises. Rather, the matters the applicant wishes to raise relate to whether natural justice was met in this particular case and as to the weight given to the competing public interests on these facts.” Rejecting the notion that there had been a miscarriage of justice, the judges note that since the case has been examined in detail by the lower courts and justice will be done by compensating Dotcom for his loss of dignity, the Supreme Court will not review the matter. “Mr Dotcom’s arguments would reprise matters all of which have been carefully examined in the Courts below and, as the Court of Appeal noted, the ‘general nature of the disputed information is known to Mr Dotcom’. In addition, these issues would arise in a context where the respondent has been held to account having accepted liability and the central question is as to the level of damages,” the judges add. In a statement on the decision to deny his appeal, this morning Dotcom criticizes the entire process, drawing particular attention to the fact that his lawyers have been prevented from doing their jobs properly on the grounds of national security. “[T]hey have not been permitted to have any meaningful input into this process because, at every stage, the GCSB has required its evidence and submissions to be treated as classified and heard only in a secret hearing from which my counsel and I were excluded,” Dotcom writes. “The Courts’ reasons were also classified and not stated in their decisions. We have been blindfolded, with one hand tied behind our backs, while up against the fully equipped and limitlessly funded GCSB and Crown lawyers seeking to keep us all in the dark and away from the truth.” While at some point Dotcom will be awarded damages for the illegal spying, he says this process has never been about money, not least since it ceased being economically viable a long time ago. “For me, it has always been about ensuring that we know what has happened and, as a result, the GCSB is held accountable publicly for its unlawful conduct under John Key’s National government. I want to make sure that this never happens again. “We shouldn’t be kept in the dark when state agencies act unlawfully and they should never get away with not being fully accountable to us, as the GCSB has now achieved. They don’t care about paying some money to me and my family, although they will fight to limit that also. They just care about you and I not getting to know what they did, or the actual harm they caused,” he adds. But while today’s ruling was handed down by New Zealand’s top court, Dotcom believes that interference from the United States played an important role in denying him access to the illegally captured communications. As a result, he’s now embarking on a new mission, one to change the law in New Zealand. “I don’t like the United States influencing what we all should be entitled to as people of New Zealand, as I fear may have happened here. No one should. But, they, and the GCSB, has stopped me from knowing the truth, at least for now. If the Court of Appeal’s decision represents the law in New Zealand, then the law must change. I will fight for that change. Please join me,” he concludes. As , Dotcom is awaiting another decision from the Supreme Court regarding his extradition to the United States. He doesn’t believe the decision will go in his favor but is preparing for a long battle, one that could see him fight in New Zealand for another seven years. reported last week Originally published as “ Supreme Court Denies Kim Dotcom’s Appeal to Access Illegal Spy Recordings ” with the Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) license

Court Of Appeal Refuses Kim Dotcom's Access To Outlawed Spy Recording

Trusts are a major form of that enables collaborations, especially economic transactions, forming a cornerstone of human civilization. As billions of people are already connected to the Internet, physical limits to cooperation have been majorly removed. However, traditional interpersonal trust can not scale with the Internet. It struggles to expand beyond family ties, long-accumulated reputations, and personal relationships formed over time. Trust has become a bottleneck for human civilization in the Internet age. social capital For many years, blockchains have been dubbed “trust machines”. Yet, we haven’t explored what type of trust is produced by blockchain and what raw materials are used for its production. Some researchers stated that the product of blockchain is , a quite intuitive view: blockchain produces blockspace, while users of on-chain applications pay gas to consume them. Even though virtual machines make blockspace programmable, blockspace is always bound to a specific virtual machine and can only be utilized by applications within the same chain. IMO, blockspace is a standardized packaging of a more general product, similar to how bottled water is a standardized packaging of water. This more general product can be called decentralized trust. blockspace Compared with trust, decentralized trust is more like belief. Belief is a meta form of trust, an endorsement of an abstract idea, and with appropriate guidance, can be transformed into trust among people who hold the same beliefs, thus fostering cooperation. Perhaps one day, we will find a better name than decentralized trust. Decentralized trust has many similarities with electricity: both are produced in the form of currency and have a wide range of uses, yet are difficult to store. The relationship between blockspace and decentralized trust is like direct current (DC) and electricity. DC is an easily usable form of electricity, and many consumer-grade appliances are driven by it. Speaking of the analogy between decentralized trust and electricity, let’s revisit the early history of electricity. Just a few years after the invention of electric light, the great Thomas Edison built the first DC power station on Pearl Street in the southeastern corner of Manhattan. Because of DC’s limited transmission distance, the power station could only serve customers within a radius of less than a mile. For users, the service they used was not electricity, but lighting, the only use case of electricity at the time. The rest of the story is well-known to almost anyone in the tech industry, Nikola Tesla, nobody at the time, invented the AC generator. AC could be transmitted over long distances. Besides lighting up bulbs, AC could also efficiently drive electric motors, thus opening up unlimited possibilities for the application of electricity. Because of these advantages, AC gradually became the main form of electricity and propelled human society into the electrical era. Today, electricity is ubiquitous in our lives. The advent of made decentralized trust arrive at its AC moment. Just as AC ushered in the age of electricity, restaking will drive human society into the era of decentralized trust. restaking If you are not yet familiar with restaking, you risk missing out on the most significant innovation in the Web3 field. Please familiarize yourself with restaking through the articles and interviews by , inventor of the restaking concept and the founder of , before continuing with this text.) Sreeram Kannan Eigenlayer Why restaking is so important for decentralized trust? Firstly, through restaking, decentralized trust can be easily transmitted over the boundaries of consensus protocols. It’s worth noting that the sharing of decentralized trust is not an invention from restaking but an exploration result of shared security. As we all know, scalability has been the core technical theme in the blockchain field in recent years. A very direct approach to scalability is the multi-chain network, which distributes applications to run on dedicated blockchains, aka appchains, thereby bypassing the capacity limit of a single chain. Meanwhile, multiple chains are connected to a network through cross-chain protocols, allowing for the exchange of assets and data between applications. However, security would linearly decrease if a single chain is simply divided into multiple chains. Therefore, researchers of multi-chain networks have been for years exploring shared security: sharing a single big source of decentralized trust between multiple blockchains. The first multi-chain network which proposed and realized shared security was . With the Polkadot relay chain at its core, shared security is achieved by dispatching relay chain validator groups to appchains (parachains in Polkadot terms). Parachains must use a unified virtual machine: Substrate runtime to take advantage of shared security. Parachains generate blocks individually, which are then finalized by the relay chain together with blocks from other parachains. As you can see, Polkadot has achieved shared security among blockchains under a unified consensus protocol. Polkadot Currently, is launching its first replicated security consumer chain: . Replicated security is the first version of shared security that the Cosmos community has long explored. All provider chain validators become validators of the consumer chain and run nodes of the consumer chain. Updates on the validator set are synchronized from the provider chain to the consumer chain via . Validators receive incentives from the consumer chain. If validators of the consumer chain behave maliciously (e.g., double-signs a block), proof of their malfeasance will be submitted to the provider chain through IBC, which invokes slashing on their staked assets on the provider chain. A major advancement of Cosmos shared security is that it transcends the boundaries of consensus protocols; that is to say, provider chains and consumer chains have independent consensus protocols. Cosmos Neutron the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol Though is not well-known as Polkadot and Cosmos, it is also one of the pioneers in exploring shared security. The core of Octopus Network is Octopus Relay which is not a chain itself but a set of smart contracts on the NEAR blockchain. All PoS operations of Octopus appchains take place on Octopus Relay, then are synchronized to the appchains via cross-chain messages. Meanwhile, all rewards and penalties of appchains are gathered to Octopus Relay and then executed on the NEAR blockchain. Since the mainnet launch in October 2021, Octopus has already achieved shared security, crossing the boundaries of consensus protocols. Octopus Network Although sharing security between blockchains existed before restaking, restaking greatly extends shared security supply, turning PoS public chains into huge security pools or decentralized trust dynamos. Based on current staking rates and the price of Ether, Ethereum can provide $35 billion worth of decentralized trust, akin to connecting the Niagara Falls hydropower station to the electricity grid. Inspired by Eigenlayer, Octopus Network has decided to use for its appchains, thereby greatly expanding the supply in its shared security market. $NEAR restaking to replace $OCT Staking as the security source More importantly, restaking can empower any system by decentralized trust, not limited to blockchains. For example, optimistic verified cross-chain bridges wait a challenging period before using the root of trust (usually block headers) to verify cross-chain messages. To prevent potential DoS plus block stuffing attacks, the challenge period usually lasts several hours or even several days, significantly increasing cross-chain transaction latency. If there is a group of witnesses based on restaking providing signed endorsements for the root of trust, they can be put into use whenever the economic value of accumulated endorsements(slashable asset) exceeds the economic value of the cross-chain transactions. By introducing restaking-based witnesses, cross-chain transaction delay can be decreased from several hours or days to a few seconds. Compared with blockspace, restaking is a universal form of decentralized trust, which open up unlimited possibilities for decentralized trust. Internet platforms sit at the centerpiece of Web 2.0 to facilitate collaboration. In Web 3.0, decentralized trust-driven cryptonetworks will replace centralized platforms. Providing the cryptonetwork is backed by enough decentralized trust, collaborators don’t need to trust each other or the operators of the cryptonetwork. When collaboration is successfully completed, the cryptonetwork captures a small portion of the economic surplus created by the collaboration and distributes it to its operators. Operators are providers of decentralized trust who participate in the operation of the cryptonetwork in a permissionless and voluntary way. They must follow the rules of the cryptonetwork; otherwise, severe economic penalties will be upon them. I believe that most internet-based economic collaborations can be achieved like this, breaking through the traditional trust bottleneck while avoiding control from centralized platforms. With the boost of restaking, decentralized trust will be everywhere! After discussing the output of trust machines, let’s look at the input. For Proof of Work blockchains, they produce decentralized trust by inputting computational power, aka chips + electricity, literally transforming into social capital. physical capital From the input and output perspective, Proof of Stake blockchains look strange. In most cases, the staking asset is both the input and output of the blockchain, so there should exist a self-reference. Take Ethereum as an example. As Ethereum carries more and more transactions and earns growing , the intrinsic value of Ether increases with its embedded cash flow( ). The rise in Ether price allows Ethereum to produce more decentralized trust, enhancing its ability to capture more protocol revenue. The economic cycle of Ethereum is self-referential, but every link in the cycle is based on logic and rational expectations. protocol revenue DCF The blockchain narrative is like others in human society: religions, nations, and currencies all originate from the common imagination of Homo sapiens. Yuval Noah Harari points out in his masterpiece “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” that common imagination is the very reason that Homo sapiens stood out in the evolutionary competition. As a rationalist, I am happy to see rational-based common imaginations gradually replacing irrational-based ones and playing an increasingly important role in the development of civilization. PoS blockchains seem like perpetual motion machines, capable of continuously producing social capital from thin air. But in the long run, the common imagination will inevitably collapse if PoS blockchains cannot effectively capture protocol revenue (please be noticed: staking income is not protocol revenue, but cost!). When the protocol revenue can’t support the valuation of the native assets, prices fall, and blockchain security decreases, further weakening the blockchain’s ability to capture value, a vicious cycle. Restaking will serve as a multiplier for Ethereum’s protocol revenue, helping Ether to internalize protocol revenue from hundreds if not thousands of decentralized systems besides the Ethereum blockchain. For other PoS blockchain communities, ignoring restaking equals ignoring the opportunity to step into a positive feedback loop, which is the only way to survive in public chain competition. By , Founder of Octopus Network. Louis Liu Also published . here

Restaking: the Only Way to Survive in Public Chain

Reafirmar: la única forma de sobrevivir en cadena pública

Reprise : le seul moyen de survivre dans la chaîne publique

आराम करना: सार्वजनिक श्रृंखला में जीवित रहने का एकमात्र तरीका

再ステーキング: パブリックチェーンで生き残る唯一の方法

Retomar: a única forma de sobreviver na cadeia pública

Đặt lại: Cách duy nhất để tồn tại trong chuỗi công khai

重质押：公链生存的唯一途径

Surprise, surprise! The US Federal Reserve remarked in a press release this week its intention to raise the interest rate benchmark by 25 basis points, resulting in a new target range of between 5.25% and 5.5%. Markets had already anticipated the move, and as such, there was little volatility in both equities and the crypto market. The FOMC went on to note that “recent indicators suggest that economic activity has been expanding at a moderate pace.” statement Nonetheless, the Fed intends to continue assessing lagging economic indicators and new information before finally deciding whether or not it will implement any more rate hikes this year. On the brighter side, even as the macro picture remains slightly uncertain, the Fed staff is no longer a recession which means inflation could eventually come down without more significant downturns to the global economy. forecasting Crypto Market Volumes at Multi-Year Lows Crypto market liquidity has been drying up after last year’s cascading liquidations that wiped out major players and dampened the market sentiment. Bitcoin’s 7-day average trading volume hit a 30-month low last week, plunging to levels that were previously witnessed before BTC broke $20K back in December 2020. Clearly, market participants remain largely inactive. But on the other hand, low activity periods like this have marked accumulation phases. Several on-chain metrics that the current market trends are reminiscent of the onset of previous bull markets. reveal Bitcoin whales holding 1K to 10K BTC are stacking sats aggressively. Bitcoin holders are taking their coins off exchanges. The accumulation score is at 0.6, which historically is a sustainable zone. Noteworthy Mentions H1 2023 Crypto Recap The first half of 2023 was quite eventful for the crypto market, from banking crises, and regulatory crackdowns to the shifting landscape of crypto hubs. In our latest article, we took a step back to reflect on the events of H1 2023 and share our view on which trends will likely dominate the second half. Here is the link to the full . article Industry Shakers Putin Signs Digital Ruble Bill Into Law Russian President Vladimir Putin has authorized a new law, granting legal tender status to the "digital ruble." The Bank of Russia, the country's central bank, will act as the platform operator for the central bank digital currency (CBDC) and conduct tests starting August 1, following Putin's approval. The bill also provides legal definitions for users and sets guidelines for banks under this framework. House Financial Services Committee Votes in Favor of Crypto, Blockchain Bills On Wednesday, the House Financial Services Committee pushed forward to resolve the details of two bills aimed at establishing a cohesive legal framework for cryptocurrencies and addressing blockchain-related matters. A majority of lawmakers voted in favor of H.R. 4763, the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act, and H.R. 1747, the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act. Both bills have been referred to the full House of Representatives for voting. Kuwait bans crypto and virtual asset transactions Kuwait's main financial regulator, the Capital Markets Authority (CMA), issued a circular addressing the supervision and issuance of virtual assets within Kuwait on July 18. The circular explicitly reaffirmed the "absolute prohibition" on various cryptocurrency use cases, including payments, investments, and mining. Additionally, it forbids local regulators from granting licenses to firms intending to offer virtual asset services as commercial enterprises. World Coin Launch Receives Mixed Reactions Sam Altman's recently launched World Coin has received mixed reactions, with some praising the Proof-of-Personhood (PoP) concept, while others, including Ethereum's co-founder Vitalik Buterin, have raised concerns about its privacy, security, centralization, and accessibility. Nonetheless, people are still signing up for the Iris scanning in return for the 25 WDC reward, especially in lower-income countries where people could really use the reward money and have little data protection laws. Also published here

The Crypto Market Liquidity Dries Up Thanks to Feds Resuming Rate Hike

ক্রিপ্টো মার্কেট লিকুইডিটি শুকিয়ে যায় ফেডস রেট হাইক পুনরায় শুরু করার জন্য ধন্যবাদ

Die Liquidität des Kryptomarktes versiegt dank der Wiederaufnahme der Zinserhöhung durch die Fed

La liquidez del criptomercado se agota gracias a la reanudación del aumento de tasas por parte de los federales

La liquidité du marché de la cryptographie s'assèche grâce à la reprise de la hausse des taux par le gouvernement fédéral

फेड द्वारा फिर से दर वृद्धि शुरू करने के कारण क्रिप्टो बाजार में तरलता कम हो गई है

FRBの利上げ再開で仮想通貨市場の流動性が枯渇

연준의 금리 인상 재개로 인해 암호화폐 시장 유동성이 고갈되었습니다

A liquidez do mercado cripto seca graças ao aumento da taxa de retorno do Fed

Fed'in Faiz Artırımına Devam Etmesi Sayesinde Kripto Piyasası Likiditesi Kurudu

Thanh khoản thị trường tiền điện tử cạn kiệt nhờ Fed tiếp tục tăng lãi suất

由于美联储恢复加息，加密货币市场流动性枯竭

Wiseman categorized bikers into two main groups: those who wear protective gear and those who eventually experience accidents. Similarly, companies can be divided into two groups regarding data protection: those who learn from the experiences of others and take precautions and those who disregard the risks posed by hardware failures, site crashes, malware, viruses, software malfunctions, and human errors. Some individuals take measures to prevent data loss because they have heard stories from those who couldn't recover from such incidents (approximately 80% of those who have experienced data loss). Additionally, larger companies face even fewer chances of successfully dealing with data loss. Data security and protection are paramount for organizations worldwide in the modern business landscape. Numerous threats can result in data corruption, destruction, or loss. While it may be challenging to anticipate these factors, preventive measures can still be taken. This is where Backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) options come into play, ensuring the resilience and recoverability of data even in the most unexpected circumstances. In this article, we will explore the Backup and DR and explore establishing a robust infrastructure that enhances data security and protection in the face of malicious activities. Backup and Disaster Recovery Definition Let's begin by understanding the concepts of Backup and DR. What is data backup? Backup involves creating copies or archives of critical data and storing them in an alternate location, allowing for recovery in the event of data loss or corruption. Backup options in and on-premises infrastructure should possess the following characteristics: cloud services Centralized backup management across various workloads. Efficient utilization of storage to minimize costs. Minimal recovery times. On the other hand, (DR) refers to the processes and measures implemented to ensure the continuity of operations and the restoration of vital infrastructure following an adverse event. disaster recovery When discussing Backup and DR, two essential metrics come into play when assessing the likelihood of recovering from natural or other disasters: : This is the maximum acceptable downtime for applications as per your service level agreement (SLA). Recovery Time Objective (RTO) : This indicates your application's maximum acceptable data loss duration due to malicious activities. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) In September 2022, Google introduced the Google Cloud Backup and DR service, which enables centralized management of Backup and DR directly from the Google Cloud console. Now, let's delve into the key features and Google Cloud benefits for workload Backup and restoration. Google Cloud Server Backup Google Cloud offers its users a straightforward approach to setting up, restoring, and managing disaster recovery (DR) and various cloud backup strategies. A key focus of the GCP backup solution is to provide a centralized management experience. What does this mean? It means you can reduce the time spent on management and control by having a comprehensive view of your data protection. With this capability, IT administrators can create application- and crash-consistent backups for virtual machines (VMs) on Compute Engine, VMware Engine, or on-premises VMware, as well as databases and file systems, all from a single interface. Your data will be stored in its original format, ensuring its readability for applications. By leveraging data protection in the cloud, you can store all your valuable information in one backup storage, in a cost-effective format, without extensive translation or transition efforts. This reduces the time required for recovery and allows critical business operations to be restored more quickly. To minimize the total cost of owning a backup solution, Google has developed a space-efficient technology called "incremental forever" storage as part of Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery. This solution follows the principle of paying only for what you use and need. Here's how it works: once you have your initial backup, Google Cloud will store subsequent backups by capturing only the block-level changes since the last backup session. This approach enables faster backups, reduces the impact on production resources, minimizes network bandwidth requirements, and lowers storage costs by optimizing the amount of storage consumed by your backups. Additionally, Google Cloud offers flexibility in terms of cost and data retention. With Google Cloud Storage, a managed service for storing unstructured data, you can choose the storage class that best suits your needs, balancing business requirements and cost efficiency. For example, Archive Storage provides the lowest-cost option for highly durable storage, suitable for data archiving, with low-latency access, online backup, and disaster recovery capabilities, ensuring that your data is available within milliseconds. Key Benefits of the Service Many people mistakenly assume that storing data in the cloud automatically guarantees its safety in the face of disasters or threats like malware. However, it's important to remember that simply using the cloud does not guarantee sufficient data security. It's crucial to assess what backup and disaster recovery capabilities your cloud provider offers. Here are the benefits of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) backup and disaster recovery: GCP provides centralized data management, allowing you to set up, monitor, and manage multiple workloads from a single dashboard. Streamlined data management and restoration: : Google Cloud Backup and DR services are VMware and application-aware, supporting many databases such as MS SQL, PostgreSQL, SAP DB, Oracle, and MongoDB. This capability enables you to significantly reduce your RPO, potentially to as low as 10 minutes, without overloading your systems due to the always incremental concept. Minimal Recovery Point Objective (RPO) : With GCP, you can instantly mount your backup data to hosts, avoiding waiting for lengthy database restoration processes. This feature ensures that you can get back to business immediately. Additionally, if you are on-premises, you can leverage the onsite cache to restore your VMware and mount the data locally, resulting in lightning-fast recovery. Moreover, you can access any 10-minute data slice since you started using the service. Instant recovery to eliminate downtime : GCP allows you to instantly mount any slice of data as a writable snapshot, facilitating activities such as analysis, audit, legal processes, or testing. Snapshot functionality for various purposes : Google Cloud Backup and DR Service charge you based on monthly usage, enabling you to pay only for what you use. The pricing is competitive, starting as low as $0.03 per GiB per month for regular data and varying for different types of databases. Additionally, Cloud Storage offers affordable space. No prior reservations are required; you only pay for your actual data. Cost optimization : GCP's backup solution leverages incremental changes added to your initial backup, reducing the need for duplicating data. This approach saves both time and costs. Efficient storage utilization : GCP allows you to restore your infrastructure with a single click. You can script complete data restoration to another region or migrate your on-premises infrastructure to the cloud within minutes, all without incurring additional costs. This feature saves you money while ensuring your data is highly protected. Additionally, you can schedule backup and DR testing, paying only for the target infrastructure when needed to restore and verify data and application integrity. Simplified infrastructure restoration In summary, GCP Backup and DR solutions offer unique features that protect your cloud workloads from unforeseen events. They also provide a secure backup solution for on-premises data by storing it in Google Cloud. By leveraging , you can optimize costs and benefit from efficient disaster recovery options in the cloud. these capabilities Compared to traditional legacy software and new entrants in the market, GCP's Backup and DR functionalities stand out as a comprehensive, unique, and reliable solution.

Essential Insights on Google Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery Service

Información esencial sobre el servicio de copia de seguridad y recuperación ante desastres de Google Cloud

Informations essentielles sur le service de sauvegarde et de reprise après sinistre de Google Cloud

Google क्लाउड बैकअप और डिजास्टर रिकवरी सर्विस पर आवश्यक अंतर्दृष्टि

Google Cloud のバックアップおよび障害復旧サービスに関する重要な洞察

Informações essenciais sobre o serviço de backup e recuperação de desastres do Google Cloud

Thông tin chi tiết cần thiết về Dịch vụ khôi phục sau thảm họa và sao lưu đám mây của Google

Google Cloud 备份和灾难恢复服务的基本见解

Ever since MEXC Global announced it was slashing maker and taker fees on the platform, the exchange has seen renewed growth, mirroring the positive turnaround seen in the wider cryptocurrency market. The fees to trade spot and futures markets on MEXC Global have both dropped to zero for maker fees, and 0.02% for futures taker fees, representing some of the lowest and most competitive rates worldwide for crypto investors. “This is great news for new and experienced crypto investors. We’ve listened to our customers and we want to provide them with the most competitive prices we can to help encourage their participation in this growing market,” Andrew Weiner, VP of MEXC Global said. “Lower rates mean people are much more likely to invest. This is a boost for individual investors, and more widely for the whole market. MEXC Global is the simplest to use and most customer-friendly cryptocurrency exchange available. As a leader in the space, we believe lowering fees is a simple way to boost engagement and investment.” The news comes as the market is bouncing back, and MEXC's business growth and increased trading volume are testaments to its reliability and efficiency. There are a number of reasons people are turning to MEXC Global, which trades around , but one that is particularly attractive is that new investors are drawn to MEXC’s low fees and extremely user-friendly interface that makes the exchange quick and easy to use, and means they can save more money to invest. $2.1bn per day in futures volume is dedicated to continuously upgrading its technology and optimizing its products. As of March 3rd, MEXC's perpetual futures liquidity is ranked No.1 in the market, supporting over 160 mainstream trading pairs in futures and 60 trading pairs in spots, with smaller price differences and lower trading costs. MEXC In an environment where retail investors are looking to save as much money as possible, low fees provide an attractive option, and offer a strong route to wider recovery for everyone. For more information, visit: www.mexc.com About MEXC MEXC is the world's leading cryptocurrency trading platform, providing one-stop cryptocurrency trading services for spot, ETF, futures, Staking, NFT Index, and more. MEXC currently serves more than 10 million users worldwide and embraces the philosophy of "Users first, MEXC's Changing for you". Visit the and for more information, and follow and . website blog MEXC Global M-Ventures

MEXC Global’s Record Low Fees Boosts Crypto Market Recovery

Las tarifas bajas récord de MEXC Global impulsan la recuperación del criptomercado

Les frais record de MEXC Global stimulent la reprise du marché de la cryptographie

एमईएक्ससी ग्लोबल का रिकॉर्ड कम शुल्क क्रिप्टो मार्केट रिकवरी को बढ़ावा देता है

MEXC グローバルの記録的な低手数料が暗号市場の回復を後押し

Taxas baixas recordes da MEXC Global impulsionam a recuperação do mercado cripto

Mức phí thấp kỷ lục của MEXC Global thúc đẩy phục hồi thị trường tiền điện tử

MEXC Global 创纪录的低费用推动加密市场复苏

A group of executives sit around a table. In front of them is a map, six heroic figures standing in a model of a data center, surrounded on all sides by small, crouching creatures in hoodies. At one end of the table, the DM is speaking dramatically. "You have retreated to the server room as the DDoS continues. The hackers have been repelled several times, but you're all injured and low on resources. This is starting to feel very much like a last stand, and the CEO is waiting for an update. What do you do?" The players discuss for a while, before the CISO takes a deep breath and looks up at the DM. Obviously the decision she's about to take is weighing on her, this is a last resort, and there will be collateral damage. Still, her voice is strong and confident as she intones: "I cast empowered firewall." Today, we’re going to look at tabletop exercises, or scenarios, and how they’re used to prepare for the worst in security. Using Tabletop Exercises to Train Cyber Security Engineers Sadly (or fortunately) that's not how tabletop exercises are really run, although there are some varieties that skirt very close to the edge of being full on games (and indeed, some that not only skirt the edge but eagerly leap over it head first). While the reality may be less full of evil gremlin-summoning cybercriminals and magic-wielding security teams, there's a strong overlap in the goals of a good scenario and a good role playing campaign. Tabletop exercises are ways of testing out plans and preparations without taking the rather more drastic step of burning down your own data center. It's important to know how the business would function after a crisis like that, and to prepare for it, but taking the actual step of burning down your data center may be seen as a bit too far for an exercise. Instead, these crisis events are gamed out, whether it's to discover lines of communication, to test incident response plans (whether business continuity or disaster recovery), or just to train employees and build awareness of the importance of security. A Short History These exercises also have a long and noble history outside of modern IT and cyber security uses, going back at least two hundred years to Reisswitz's "Kriefsspiel" in 1824, developed by him and his father and described by General Karl von Mueffling as "not a game at all! It's training for war. I shall recommend it enthusiastically to the whole army." It's an approach used by global militaries to prepare their forces for engagements, with NATO having kicked off a Wargaming Initiative in 2022 in Paris. Even emergency services, with the NHS regularly running simulations involving dozens of actors and full makeup teams to effectively simulate injuries. Given that there's centuries (even if only two) of evidence of tabletop exercises, gamified scenarios, helping prepare for crises, disasters, military engagements, and similar, along with the cost of such exercises being extremely low compared to being unprepared when a scenario hits, you might fall into the trap of thinking that they are used everywhere today. Sadly, that isn't the case. For a whole slew of reasons, while those who do make good use of tabletop exercises swear by the value they bring, many organisations just don't use them. It might be ostrich syndrome, as these scenarios can be exceptionally good at pulling out all sorts of failings that people don’t want to acknowledge. It could be reluctance to get involved with something seen as 'play' or 'childish'. Maybe it’s having experienced poorly run scenarios consisting of an overly-engineered PowerPoint presentation with no interaction and a lot of marketing FUD. For whatever reason, some organisations are reluctant to seek them out and use this valuable tool. This is, fortunately, changing, with events like the annual conference bringing together experts in learning, simulations, gamification, and games. Furthermore, a number of companies offer standard and bespoke exercises to their product catalogs. Full disclosure, as you might expect my own family company, has been running these with great results for years. Play Secure Bores The idea of using tabletop scenarios as a place to test or stress-test plans and prepare for disasters, building up tolerances for stress and panic in those involved (run well they are intense experiences), and provide a place to get things wrong safely is spreading. The Different Types of Tabletop Exercises There's a whole slew of options when you're running a tabletop exercise, depending what you want out of it. As a marketing and awareness exercise for a particular threat or event then a highly structured format involving detailed inputs, limited (or even no) choices, almost as a replay of real events can be highly effective - less engaging, but scalable at low effort in a way more involved scenarios are not. At the other end of the spectrum we end up with the much more open scenarios, almost completely unscripted and requiring a skilled moderator to run, responding in realtime to participant's decisions, creating new injects on the fly. As a general rule the more scripted the tabletop exercise the easier it is to run at scale, the more effort it takes for the initial creation, and the less knowledge it requires from a moderator to run. A company could easily put out a pre-prepared internal scenario in the style of a choose your own adventure book with limited choices, and leave teams to run their own sessions. The less scripted the session, the harder to run at scale (possible, but requires more resources and effort), and the more knowledge and expertise required of the moderator. The ideal here is someone with experience of the sort of incident being simulated, along with experience of running game sessions (yes, I do put thirty years of running tabletop RPG sessions on my CV when I'm pitching these exercises). What unscripted sessions do provide is the chance to test specific plans, or even build them based on actions and choices during the exercise. Alongside this, you need to consider the type of incident that you want to test out. A business continuity tabletop exercise will aim to uncover how an organisation can keep operating at an acceptable level when critical systems fail. Incident response will look to security incidents, in most cases, but can cover anything from bad press to a shipwrecked CEO. Business continuity scenarios are aimed at how the business responds to a crisis or critical failure, and keeps some level of function going throughout. It’s a great way to work out what’s genuinely critical, and what level of service is required to be a viable business. Disaster recovery often naturally flows from business continuity, uncovering how an organisation moves from business continuity plans back to normal operations (or how to restore from backup). Crisis management can be almost anything, including all the above. How Do You Run a Tabletop Exercise? I'd love to say the best way to run one is to engage a professional (and it is true, if you have budget and can find a then you should). However, if you're just looking to test out the idea, or looking for a new take for family game night, then you can easily run a tabletop session yourself with limited effort. You will be relying on your own expertise, so pick a scenario you have some experience of for best results (and an environment you're familiar with - when building these scenarios I'll usually involve an intense discovery phase to understand the organisation well enough). professional The simplest way once you have a scenario is then to decide what the 'truth' is. This is what's actually happened behind the scenes. Who's the attacker, or what's really gone wrong. This doesn't need to be incredibly detailed, depending on your improv skills and confidence, but a golden rule is not to alter it during the exercise - a little inconsistency can destroy engagement and remove any learning potential. Once you have that 'truth', spend some time thinking about how the participants will see it. They're not going to have the full information from the get-go - even in a scenario as simple as a data center burning down the first thing the organisation is likely to see is services failing. Whatever you brainstorm here will form your first injects - which could be as simple as saying to the group 'this is what you see' or, for a more powerful effect, social media messages from customers, ransomware notices, news headlines, and similar (you can grab some free templates to create a few of these ). here Once you've done that, the hardest thing is scheduling a time to get your participants together. That one I can't help with. Finally you'll have everything you need: the scenario, injects, your participants, and ideally someone to take detailed notes of what happens. After that, it's about narrative and storytelling. Open up with the initial injects, and then hand over to your participants to decide what happens next. When they take an action, respond with more information depending on what they've done, maybe with more injects, and iterate until the scenario is complete. Completion can be hard to define, so realistically you want to run until the scenario is stable - meaning any further actions will make no immediate difference (once the decision is made to rebuild a data center for example, there's limited value in playing through the months of construction that would be involved). Take the notes, pull out anything important, and start preparing for the next tabletop exercise. If you’re convinced to give one a try and need a little advice, or if you want someone to come in and run a series of exercises, you can reach me on or . Twitter LinkedIn

Dungeons and Disaster Recovery: Tabletop Exercises for IT Training

অন্ধকূপ এবং দুর্যোগ পুনরুদ্ধার: আইটি প্রশিক্ষণের জন্য ট্যাবলেটপ অনুশীলন

Dungeons und Disaster Recovery: Tabletop-Übungen für die IT-Schulung

Mazmorras y recuperación ante desastres: ejercicios de simulación para la formación en TI

Donjons et reprise après sinistre : exercices sur table pour la formation informatique

कालकोठरी और आपदा रिकवरी: आईटी प्रशिक्षण के लिए टेबलटॉप अभ्यास

Dungeons and Disaster Recovery: IT トレーニングのための卓上演習

던전 및 재해 복구: IT 교육을 위한 모의 훈련

Masmorras e recuperação de desastres: exercícios de mesa para treinamento em TI

Zindanlar ve Felaket Kurtarma: BT Eğitimi için Masaüstü Egzersizleri

Ngục tối và Khắc phục thảm họa: Bài tập trên bàn để đào tạo CNTT

地下城与灾难恢复：IT 培训桌面练习

Twitter v. Elon Musk Court Filing by Potter Anderson & Corroon LLP, July 12, 2022 is part of . You can jump to any part in this filing . This is part 18 of 31. HackerNoon’s Legal PDF Series here Feature Image: HackerNoon’s Midjourney AI, Prompt “to hell with data privacy” FACTUAL ALLEGATIONS VI. Musk grasps for an out B. Defendants’ lawyer letters 82. Even as Musk was violating his own contractual obligations, Twitter continued to respond cooperatively to his representatives’ increasingly unreasonable inquiries. Between May 16 and May 20, the company provided detailed written responses to several information requests. 83. On May 20, 2022, Musk’s team sent a request for Twitter’s “firehose” data — which is essentially a live-feed of data concerning activity (Tweeting, Retweeting, and “liking” Tweets, for example) associated with the public accounts on Twitter’s platform. Again, no explanation was offered for how this request furthered a “reasonable business purpose related to the consummation of the transactions contemplated by” the merger agreement, as required by Section 6.4. Nor can the firehose data even be used to accurately estimate the prevalence of spam or false accounts. , that estimate depends in part on private data not available in the firehose. Conversely, the firehose includes Tweets that Twitter’s systems and processes catch and do not count within mDAU for that day. As Agrawal had explained in his May 16 Tweets 84. On May 21, 2022, Twitter hosted a third diligence session with Musk’s team and yet again discussed Twitter’s processes for calculating mDAU and estimates of spam or false accounts. Twitter also provided a detailed summary document describing the process the company uses to estimate spam as a percentage of mDAU. 85. Defendants responded with increasingly invasive and unreasonable requests. And rather than use “reasonable best efforts to minimize any disruption to the respective business of the Company and its Subsidiaries that may result from requests for access,” Ex. 1 § 6.4, defendants repeatedly demanded immediate responses to their access requests. The scope of the requests and the deadlines defendants imposed on their satisfaction were unreasonable, disruptive to the business, and far outside the bounds of Section 6.4. 86. Twitter nonetheless continued to work with Musk to try to respond to the requests. It extended an ongoing offer to engage with Musk and his representatives regarding its calculation of mDAU, and held several more diligence sessions through the end of May. It also provided detailed written responses, including custom reporting, to his escalating requests for information. 87. On May 25, 2022, defendants’ counsel sent the first of a series of aggressive letters copying their litigation counsel at Quinn Emmanuel. This one falsely asserted that Twitter had “failed to respond to any” of defendants’ information requests and insisted that defendants be granted access to the firehose data so Musk could “make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform.” Though the letter called Twitter’s own spam detection methodologies “lax,” it identified no basis for that charge. 88. Nor, again, did defendants explain how fulfillment of the firehose data demand would further consummation of the merger or what basis they had to demand the right to “make an independent assessment” of the prevalence of false or spam accounts on the platform. Even assuming that was a proper purpose, reviewing the full firehose data would not result in an accurate assessment or mimic the rigorous process that Twitter employs by sampling accounts and using public and private data to manually determine whether an account constitutes spam — as Twitter’s representatives had already repeatedly explained to Musk’s team. 89. On May 27, 2022, Twitter responded by noting its weeks-long active engagement with Musk’s team and explaining that some of defendants’ requests sought disclosure of highly sensitive information and data that would be difficult to furnish and would expose Twitter to competitive harm if shared. After all, Musk had said he would do one of three things with Twitter: sit on its board, buy it, or build a competitor. He had already accepted and then rejected the first option, and was plotting a pretextual escape from the second. Musk’s third option — building a competitor to Twitter — remained. Still, Twitter again responded constructively and reiterated its commitment to work with Musk’s team to provide reasonable access to requested information. 90. On May 31, 2022, defendants lobbed another missive, again falsely asserting that Twitter had “refused” to provide requested data and that the company’s spam or false account detection methods were “inadequate.” The letter claimed Musk was willing to implement protocols to protect against “damage or competitive harm to the company.” 91. On June 1, 2022, Twitter responded by refuting that it had “refused” provision of data, demonstrating that, to the contrary, it had been working with Musk’s team to honor their requests within the bounds of the contract. To help set the protocols Musk had said he was willing to honor, Twitter asked a series of questions directed at how the data would be used and by whom, and how it would be protected. 92. Defendants’ response on June 6, 2022 made no effort to answer those questions or identify data-protection protocols; instead, it accused Twitter of breach and advanced a false narrative that Twitter had been stonewalling Musk’s requests. Musk publicly filed the letter, which repeated his baseless and damaging charge that Twitter had “lax” detection methods. He included none of Twitter’s correspondence in that filing and omitted all details about the information Twitter had provided. He thus continued to present the public with a misleadingly incomplete narrative about his communications with Twitter, with equally misleading implications about the likelihood that the merger would be completed and about Twitter’s operations. 93. Steadfast in its commitment to consummate the merger, Twitter continued to try to get Musk’s team what it demanded while safeguarding its customers’ data and harboring very real concerns about how Musk might use the data if he succeeded in escaping the deal. On or about June 9, 2022, Musk’s counsel indicated that granting access to 30 days’ worth of historical firehose data would satisfy Musk’s request for the firehose data. So, on June 15, the company gave Musk’s team secure access to that raw data — about 49 tebibytes’ worth. It did so even though the merger agreement did not require the sharing of this information. 94. Musk’s next lawyer letter, dated June 17, 2022, skimmed over this massive data production. Like the earlier correspondence, the June 17 letter described an alternative reality in which Twitter had failed to cooperate in supplying Musk with information, entirely contrary to the facts, apparently in the belief that repeating a falsehood enough can make it true. The letter also continued to move the goal posts by adding a new request for “the sample set” and “calculations” Twitter used to estimate that fewer than 5% of its mDAUs are false or spam accounts over the past eight quarters. Thus, with no basis, defendants sought to audit information Twitter consistently had caveated as an “estimate” requiring “significant judgment” to prepare. 95. The June 17 letter further contained a litigation-style discovery demand for information Musk asserted was needed to investigate “the truthfulness of Twitter’s representations to date regarding its active user base, and the veracity of its methodologies for determining that user base.” It broadly demanded board materials relating to mDAU and spam, as well as emails, text messages, and other communications about those topics — highly unusual requests in the context of good faith efforts toward completion of any merger transaction, and absurd in the context of this one, which has no diligence condition. Musk propounded these unreasonable requests and touted his contrived narrative about Twitter’s methodologies, all without ever identifying a basis for questioning the veracity of Twitter’s methodologies or the accuracy of its SEC disclosures. 96. On June 20, 2022, Twitter set the record straight in a detailed response letter. It noted that the two sides had been working collaboratively to clear regulatory hurdles and “address voluminous data requests” from defendants, that Twitter had “dedicated significant resources” to providing defendants with the data requested, and that Twitter had already provided a wealth of data sweeping far beyond the bounds of what might conceivably be deemed reasonably necessary to consummate the transaction. Twitter noted that Musk, while continuing to accuse Twitter of misrepresenting its spam or false account estimate, had offered not a single fact to support the accusation. And Twitter observed that defendants’ “increasingly irrelevant, unsupportable, and voluminous information requests” appeared directed not at consummating the merger but rather the opposite: trying to avoid the merger. 97. Nonetheless, in a continuing effort at cooperation, Twitter agreed to provide Musk everything he now demanded regarding the firehose, including access to “100% of Tweets and favoriting activity.” Twitter cautioned, as it had so many times before, that this data would not allow Musk to accurately assess the number of spam or false accounts. But on June 21, 2022, it gave defendants’ counsel the demanded access. 98. Meanwhile, Agrawal and Twitter CFO Ned Segal had been trying to set up a meeting with Musk to discuss the company’s process in estimating the prevalence of spam or false accounts. On June 17, 2022, Segal proposed a discussion with Musk and his team to “cover spam as a % of DAU.” Musk responded that he had a conflict at the proposed time. When Agrawal sought to reengage on the matter, Musk agreed to a time on June 21, but then bowed out and asked Agrawal and Segal to speak with his team not about the spam estimation process but “the pro forma financials for the debt.” 99. On June 29, 2022, Musk complained through counsel that Twitter purportedly had “placed an artificial cap on the number of searches” Musk’s experts could run on the firehose data, and had failed to respond to certain of the new requests made on June 17. (False again, as explained below.) The June 29 letter notably did not take issue with Twitter’s refusal to provide responses to the discovery-like requests for emails, text messages, and other communications in the June 17 letter. But it contained a slew of new demands — several asking Twitter to create more custom reporting. 100. On July 1, 2022, Twitter pointed out just how far beyond the scope of Section 6.4 defendants’ requests had strayed. Nonetheless, Twitter noted that it was providing yet more information in response to recent requests and would continue to devote the “time and considerable resources” necessary to respond to outstanding requests. Twitter also explained that it had placed “no artificial throttling of rate limits.” In follow-up correspondence, it became clear that the “limit” Musk had bumped up against was not the result of throttling but a default 100,000-per-month limit on the number of queries that could be conducted. With his undisclosed team of data reviewers working behind the scenes, Musk had hit that limit within about two weeks. Twitter immediately agreed to, and did, raise the monthly search query limit one hundred-fold, to 10 million — more than 100 times what most paying Twitter customers would get. 101. From the outset of this extraordinary post-signing information exchange process, Musk accused Twitter of “lax” methodologies for calculating spam or false accounts. Knowing that his actions risked harm to Twitter and its stockholders, wreaked havoc on the trading price of Twitter’s stock, and could have serious consequences for the deal, Musk leveled serious charges, both publicly and through lawyer letters, that Twitter had misled its investors and customers. But Musk exhibited little interest in understanding Twitter’s process for estimating spam accounts that went into the company’s disclosures. Indeed, in a June 30 conversation with Segal, Musk acknowledged he had not read the detailed summary of Twitter’s sampling process provided back in May. Once again, Segal offered to spend time with Musk and review the detailed summary of Twitter’s sampling process as the Twitter team had done with Musk’s advisors. That meeting never occurred despite multiple attempts by Twitter. 102. From the outset, defendants’ information requests were designed to try to tank the deal. Musk’s increasingly outlandish requests reflect not a genuine examination of Twitter’s processes but a litigation-driven campaign to try to create a record of non-cooperation on Twitter’s part. When Twitter nonetheless bent over backwards to address the increasingly burdensome requests, Musk resorted to false assertions that it had not. Continue reading here

Musk's Lawyers Repeatedly Accused Twitter of Failure to Disclose Data in Failed Attempt to Back Out

Los abogados de Musk acusaron repetidamente a Twitter de no revelar datos en un intento fallido de retractarse

Les avocats de Musk ont accusé à plusieurs reprises Twitter de ne pas avoir divulgué de données lors d'une tentative infructueuse de retour en arrière

कस्तूरी के वकीलों ने बार-बार ट्विटर पर बैक आउट के असफल प्रयास में डेटा का खुलासा करने में विफलता का आरोप लगाया

マスクの弁護士は、撤回の試みに失敗した際にデータを開示しなかったとして、Twitterを繰り返し非難しました

Os advogados de Musk acusaram repetidamente o Twitter de não divulgar dados em uma tentativa fracassada de voltar atrás

Các luật sư của Musk liên tục cáo buộc Twitter không tiết lộ dữ liệu trong nỗ lực rút lui không thành công

马斯克的律师多次指责 Twitter 未能披露数据，但未能成功退出

“Will my job become obsolete as AI becomes more advanced?” This is a question that’s recently kept many professionals up at night. As artificial intelligence continues to spread its tentacles into various industries, many experts are warning about the pervasive reach of this development. “AI will wipe out a lot of current jobs, as has happened with all past technologies,” Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard, told the Guardian earlier this year. “But I have no reason to think that AI and robots won’t continue changing the mix of jobs. The question is: will the change in the mix of jobs exacerbate existing inequalities? Katz is one of many who believe rapid advancements in machine learning and robotics will kill numerous jobs, especially the repetitive and manual ones. Industries like manufacturing, customer service, content creation, and data entry are particularly vulnerable to automation. How Many Jobs WIll Be Lost to AI? According to Forbes, Goldman Sachs estimates that 300 million jobs could be lost or diminished by AI. In a 2019 study by Wells Fargo, researchers concluded robots could eliminate up to 200,000 jobs in banking alone in the next ten years. In May 2023, AI contributed to 3,900 job losses in the US, making it the 7th highest contributor to employment losses cited by employers that month. Other experts argue the sky is not falling because of AI and humans are still winning the job market. “I think people are able to adapt quite quickly, like when Photoshop came onto the scene a long time ago,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified during a Senate panel hearing on AI. “For a while, people were quite fooled by Photoshop images but then pretty quickly developed an understanding that images might be Photoshopped. This will be like that but on steroids.” Other AI proponents hold a similar view: Every technological revolution, from the industrial to the digital, has raised similar fears, yet every time, the economy adapted, and new job roles emerged. The consensus is that AI will free humans from mundane tasks, giving them more time to focus on creative, strategic, and interpersonal roles that AI can’t perform quite well. “ChatGPT can’t design a system, or build an architecture, or create the ecosystem of supporting infrastructure you need for any complex system,” Marcus Merrell, the vice president of Technology Strategy at Sauce Labs, observes about OpenAI’s groundbreaking tool. “It can potentially help you think through some ideas, but it can’t innovate. Most importantly, you still need to know the difference between a good answer and a bad answer.” Each expert is right: AI’s impact isn’t merely binary – it’s not just about job creation or destruction. The crux lies in job transformation. While AI will reshape the professional landscape, our adaptability, foresight, and willingness to learn will truly determine our place in it. The same could be said about lightning channels. “Workers will require new skills as the division of labor between humans and machines continues to evolve,” the World Economic Forum advises. “It is critical that businesses take an active role in supporting their existing workforces through reskilling and upskilling, that individuals take a proactive approach to their lifelong learning, and that governments create an enabling environment to facilitate this workforce transformation. This is the key challenge of our time.” Will your job become obsolete? Possibly. Will you still thrive in this tech-driven era if you lose that job? It’s less about the job and more about how you evolve. This story was distributed as a release by Ascend under HackerNoon’s Brand As An Author Program. Learn more about the program here: https://business.hackernoon.com/brand-as-author

Will the Workforce Be Taken Over By AI?

কর্মশক্তি কি এআই দ্বারা নেওয়া হবে?

Wird die Belegschaft von KI übernommen?

¿La IA se hará cargo de la fuerza laboral?

La main-d’œuvre sera-t-elle prise en charge par l’IA ?

क्या कार्यबल पर AI का कब्ज़ा हो जाएगा?

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