Saytis in the Customer Success Management Industry

Sayt

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Sam Altman and his team are now part of Microsoft. I can see becoming less and less relevant over time. Investors are about to lose a lot of money over this debacle. Satya pulled a 4D chess move before the markets opened. OpenAI OpenAI is just the ‘AI Safety’ arm of Microsoft when you boil it down. All the cautious folks are in one place to manage at a distance while Sam gets to play God internally as CEO of this new team. As the , does that mean he would also have oversight and input into the OpenAI roadmap? That would be hilarious if true. I mean, no one really is taking much notice of ̶E̶d̶ ̶S̶h̶e̶e̶r̶a̶n̶ Emmett Shear taking over as Interim CEO. new CEO of the Advanced AI Research team Unfortunately, we’re back to the same old Microsoft vs. Google v Apple power play again. . Sam could have been thinking he would run both at the same time. Perhaps the Board saw too much conflict and then dumped him. Satya leads the negotiations because he has to make sure there’s an outcome that protects everyone’s interests. But maybe Sam and Satya were already in discussions for the new AI Research team, and the Board only just became aware at the 11th hour Mira wanted Sam to stay; it was obvious that if he left, then there’d pretty much be an exodus from OpenAI, leaving it floundering. As Interim CEO of the day, it makes sense to placate the Board and have Sam stay in some capacity whilst setting up the new venture in Microsoft. But Ilya’s ego is too big, and the Board refuses to budge, setting off this chain of events all over again. This time, Sams walks off arm in arm with Satya, and Sayta pulls off the greatest acquihire in tech history without spending a dime. There was never a rehire option on the table for Sam at OpenAI; the discussions were to lay out the plan going forward but had to be accelerated as a result of Board ineptitude. This could explain how Satya could mobilize the resolution so quickly and get it approved himself. There had to have been prior discussions, and you don’t get to be the CEO of an entirely new division at Microsoft purely based on a Hail Mary board meeting. "OpenAI is nothing without its people." has become a rallying cry across Twitter. It's a signal to Sam and Greg, who are ready to jump ship to Microsoft. Notice that Satya says, "Microsoft stays committed to OpenAI," meaning "we'll continue to provide them with Azure services until they're no longer useful to us." which might be sooner than expected if there are no employees to maintain ChatGPT and and APIs. DALL-E services Given the amount of staff announcing their intended departure, I don't expect OpenAI to last or have the same industry impact, nor be of interest to investors in its current shape. I mean, who really wants to continue to invest in a company manned by AI safety researchers who don’t like innovating? Microsoft's investment was mostly Azure cloud credits, so that can be pulled at any point, and they could absorb the write-off easily. It would be funny if OpenAI had to turn to Microsoft and the new Advanced AI Research team for help... The question now is: how many users and businesses are reconsidering their subscriptions? How many consultancies and services based on ChatGPT capabilities are now rethinking and scrambling around for second options? The fallout from this is far from over. Also published . here

Satya Is A Grand Master At 4D Chess

“Even this must have a preface—that is, a literary preface,”

Food and Flavor: A Gastronomic Guide to Health and Good Living: Chapter VIII - EPICUREAN ITALY

David Copperfield: Chapter 32 - The Beginning Of A Long Journey

T-shaped people take part. Trident people take over 🔱 TLDR Trident skills are powerful Conor McGregor is a great example Choose skills that are loosely overlapping Choose skills that are highly leveraged What is a T-shaped skillset? T-shaped skillsets are well known. Quite simply it is where you master one skill deeply while maintaining a basic capability across a wider set of skills. There is a lot of value in building a T-shape skillset, it is certainly better than being a specialist in one thing only. However, the most successful people have something else: a Trident skillset. Trident skillsets 🔱 Being in the top 1% is almost impossible Look at the diagram below. To be the best in the world at any skill is extremely rare and borderline impossible. The amount of work and dedication required is phenomenal. At this level, exponential effort is required to obtain even the smallest incremental gain. Only the world’s most naturally talented hardest working will arrive at the 1% level. and https://forge.medium.com/how-to-become-the-best-in-the-world-at-something-f1b658f93428 Betting your life on being in the top 1% might be admirable, but it’s not statistically smart. Being in the top 10% is much easier Now look at the green section of the above diagram. The required effort to be in the top 10% is much easier and would be a much more reasonable goal to aim for. Being in the top 10% is awesome, you enjoy significant upside. You’ll likely garner a good salary, have a happy life, and be well respected. The simple fact that 90% of people don’t even try means that if you’re willing to put just a little bit of effort in, you’ll be successful. As one of my favorite sayings goes: Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard T-shaped people are valuable, but not hard to come by. There won’t be a huge premium paid for them, but they can live a comfortable life. However, if greatness is what you’re looking for, you’ll need a Trident 🔱. Being the top 10% in a combination of 2–3 skills Being in the top 10% in a combination of 2–3 skills is far easier to achieve than being in the top 1% in one specific skill. It may be easier, but it’s still rare. Fortunately for you, it’s rare because of other people’s choices and not because of the work required to obtain them. I call this unique combination of skills a because of the shape it creates when you get to the top 10% in 3 separate skills. ‘Trident skillset’ As we discovered earlier, getting to the top 10% is not too difficult. The ability to get to the top 10% in two or three separate skills is only slightly more difficult but overall still doable. It’s powerful because the total number of people who have a combination of these skills falls dramatically, while the ability to acquire semi-mastery in each one is relatively easy. Top 1% of basketball players = 10 peopleNumber of people in the top 10% of entrepreneurship, public speaking, and design = 10 people The number of people to compete with is equal, but the level of competition in each skill is much lower. Your strength is the combination. Aim for skills that don’t overlap If two skills overlap significantly, there are more people who can perform them, thus making it harder to stand out. This would be the equivalent of a really good accountant being really good at statistics also. Avoid two closely linked skills. Choose a combination of complimentary but loosely overlapping skills The further apart your skillsets are from each other the rarer the combination will be. Let’s view the above skill stack from a bird’s eye view. You can see below that the darker blue area is where our skills overlap, each individual skill is not hard to master but the combination is what makes it rare. Trident skillsets in action Michael Jordan is in the top 1% of his chosen skill (basketball). Sitting proudly at the top of the his net worth is over $1bn. Clearly achieving 1% stardom is profitable, it’s just really really hard. red zone, On the other hand, let’s take a look at another sports superstar, Conor McGregor. Conor’s skillset is arguably lower. Perhaps sitting more in the orange zone. in fact, he’s ranked number #15. He’s also lost 5 out 27 of his professional fights. Conor is not the highest-ranked fighter in the world, and argued to be the greatest of all time He has a record of 26 wins and 1 loss (his only loss was a disqualification so not really a loss either). Jon Jones is ranked as the number #1 pound-for-pound fighter in the world . So why is Conor McGregor worth $110M and Jon Jones only $10M? UFC fighters ranked by net worth: Conor McGregor: $110M (#15 pound-for-pound fighter in the world) Rorion Gracie: $50M George St-Pierre: $30M Brock Lesnar: $28M BJ Penn: $22M Anderson Silva: $18M Wanderlei Silva: $18M Randy Couture $17M Alistair Overeem: $15M Tito Ortiz $15M Chuck Lidell: $14M Quinton Jackson: $12M Ronda Rousey: $11M Frank Mir: $11M Chael Sonnon: $10M Jon Jones: $10M (#1 pound-for-pound fighter in the world) Conor is the richest man in UFC history, but it’s not because of his fighting skills. He is the richest man in UFC history because he is in the top 10% of a combination of three distinctly separate skills: FightingShowmanshipWhisky Conor is pretty good at , but he’s not the top 1%. fighting Conor is also a pretty good and known as the king of trash talk Many fighters don’t prioritize showmanship, but Conor’s brash style has paid off and earned him a mega-following. showman (as seen by one of my favorite post-fight interviews below). Conor is also pretty good at making . But judging by the , The whisky is not that good either! whisky customer reviews Proper Twelve Irish Whisky Review In each individual skill Conor is not the greatest. But when you put them all together? You get a net worth of $110M and one of the world’s most popular sportsmen. Why? Because it’s a rare combination. Which are the best skills to obtain? In short, you want skills that are leveraged. Naval Ravikant has a great piece talking about leverage which you can read more on . here Naval explains that historically we have only really had two types of leverage: — amplify results by using money Money leverage — amplify results by using people Labor leverage But money is hard to come by, and labor requires you to pay for wages or people being willing enough to follow you (like a popular politician). Naval explains, however, that there are two new forms of leverage: — write one line of code and have an army of robots work for you Code leverage — make one video and be seen by millions of people Media leverage Code and media leverage are especially powerful because they are free, and are permissionless (unlike a banker to approve your loan, no one stops you from learning to code). Anyone can learn to code, and anyone made youtube videos and reach millions of people. Conor McGregor has built skills in two areas of leverage: and Both are supported by a fundamental core strength, . money (using his whisky business to grow his capital) media (using his showmanship to increase his audience reach and influence). fighting In 2021, the best skills for you to invest in are leveraged ones. Core skill + leveraged skill + leveraged skill = unstoppable force Key takeaways Aiming for the top 1% in any field is futile. It’s far better to be in the top 10% of 2–3 skills and combine them. You have a similar rarity to the top 1%, thus there is little competition. Any competition you do have, is easier to beat and the potential rewards can be huge. Quick takeaways: Trident skillsets are taking over the world 🔱 Choose skills that are complimentary but don’t overlap too much The best combination of skills includes leveraged ones like: design, coding, media, creative work Now you know about , what skillset will you take over the world with? Trident skills References: Check out Scott Adams version of ‘skill stacking’ and the beautiful visual explanation from Tomas Pueyo for more on the below. Come and say hey 👋 Unleashing the power of go-to-market design to launch and scale your startup. Check out my website — www.alfie-marsh.com Watch my Youtube videos Message me on LinkedIn Access my free knowledge base Get free access to a curation of all my favorite, articles, blogs, videos, podcasts, and other resources linked to GTM Design and scaling startups.

The Trident Strategy: Using A Combination Of 2–3 Skills To Maximize Wealth

The are a series of interviews featuring various important voices and perspectives in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Each interviewee was carefully selected and asked the same group of questions. The main goal was to provide the world with a collection of commentary and opinions on the state of the current Bitcoin and crypto market. Some of the names you will recognize while others don’t wish for the limelight but have great insight and experience we all can learn from. Bitcoin Bear Market Diaries These interviews are raw and unfiltered with no agenda other than giving each individual their opportunity to speak their mind. If you like what you see, please share with your friends. If something offends you, you should probably X out and find another crypto fluff piece that gives you warm fuzzies. Nic Carter is Partner at Castle Island Ventures and cofounder of Coinmetrics.io and offers an interesting perspective on Bitcoin. His experience and analytical approach has always impressed me. Name Nic Carter Country I live in the US, although I’m originally from the UK. I sound American though. How do people know you? Most likely from my tweets or medium articles. I also cofounded a fund called Castle Island Ventures and co-created Coin Metrics, a blockchain analytics startup. How long have you been into Bitcoin? Casually since 2013, seriously since 2015. I’m not an OG! Best Bitcoin experience? Hmm… Anytime I send Bitcoin. It still feels magical. Other very memorable moments for me where when I finally understood the significance of the difficulty adjustment, or when I began to deeply understand the significance of Proof of Work, and how Bitcoin works with a dynamic validator set. It was a gradual process for me though, not sudden. Worst Bitcoin experience? Reflecting on all the Bitcoin I’ve blown on buying stupid stuff over the years… What do you think is Bitcoin’s biggest threat? Either a far superior alternative comes along — and it would have to compete on the important dimensions, like monetary credibility, scarcity, unforgeable costliness of supply, settlement assurances, and so on — or the proof of work function ends up being costlier than we thought, and it has to be abandoned. The latter would be the case if it turns out that the fee market can’t subsidize security at maturity. But what that will actually mean is that Bitcoin will have already failed, since that requires people not treating Bitcoin block space as valuable. So that would fall into the category of failing due to lack of interest. I think some of these protocol-level challenges can be dealt with, though. Ultimately, Bitcoin is a registry of ownership (the UTXO set), and the protocol can malleate to support that registry. A lot of money has been sunk into distributing those coins fairly, and no one wants to give that up. So much like ETH 2.0 is doing (changing virtually everything about the protocol, aside from the account set), I think Bitcoin could always radically modify its core features while retaining continuity in the UTXO set. What are your thoughts on the various Bitcoin forks? I’d prefer for altcoins to live and die on their own merits rather than trying to co-opt Bitcoin’s brand to market themselves. I usually take a fairly data driven approach so if a Bitcoin fork showed significant traction from a usage perspective, I’d take it seriously. But as of now, all the Bitcoin forks are wastelands. That said, Bitcoin can’t stop anyone using its brand. That’s both a strength and a weakness of it being an unowned protocol. What are you optimistic about in this space? The quality of individuals I meet, and the significance of what they understand they are building. The people I know are passionate about building resilient, anti-authoritarian technology. I’m not a technologist, which you might find surprising despite my job and startup, but I do see the importance of technology which is profoundly political in nature. I think the most politically impactful technologies of the last century have been the AK-47 (cheap and reliable weapon which enabled insurgencies to have success in asymmetric situations against much more powerful adversaries), the landmine (tilted the scales in favor of territory retention), and public key cryptography (granted individuals information privacy against state-level adversaries). The common theme there is that defense against more powerful actors became cheaper and more effective — for better or for worse. Compare the might of Al Quaeda or the Viet Cong to the American or Russian empires that took them on. I am not passing judgments on those technologies, merely noting their significance. In the next two decades I think cheap autonomous drones will radically alter warfare once again, alongside cheap 3D-printed or home-milled weapons — both with sweeping consequences. Alongside this, I foresee Bitcoin and non-state currencies challenging incumbent sovereign currencies; and self-sovereign data initiatives like Urbit challenging the massive oligopolies that currently rule the internet. The common trend here is the individual will be empowered, if they want to be. Undoubtedly there will be a backlash from those who benefit from the redistributive and highly inflationary fiat system — and we’re seeing it already from the press and academia — but the forces Bitcoin has unleashed are far too powerful to be stopped by naysayers. The demand for an exit ramp from weak sovereign currencies, generalized asset inflation, political short-termism, forced redistribution, and the mismanagement of central banks is overwhelming. Venezuela is just the beginning. Bitcoin and related anti-authoritarian technology is a powerful liberating force that frees individuals from the financial systems that they happened to be born into. There’s no reason we need 200 sovereign currencies, the vast majority of which are terribly managed. Global, neutral standards of value exist, and there is no going back now. They have already and will continue to challenge the power of the State, which is pretty impressive. The people in this industry for the most part appreciate the historical significance of what they are building, and I feel honored that I get to play a part in it. Biggest regret during the last bull market? Spending too much time looking at ICOs. For my Masters thesis I read and summarized over fifty whitepapers (the objective being to grade them on their transparency, putative governance model, and tokenholder rights). That merely confirmed my belief that virtually every ICO was an opportunistic extractive scheme designed to expropriate wealth from gullible individuals. What have you learned during the current bear market? Just how resilient ICOs and token models can be — the vast majority have yet to admit that they are abject failures — and that people are endlessly willing to forget past records of bad behavior. I thought that some of the bad actors in the industry would be hounded out by jilted token investors, but for the most part that hasn’t happened yet. What is the biggest fail you have seen during the bear market? The Coinbase Neutrino acquisition and subsequent mismanaged PR. Holy hell was that bad. What do you think helped trigger the current bear market? It was an inevitable consequence of the bull market. Asset prices are a reflection of discounted future expectations, and everyone collectively felt that that the distant future was far closer than it was in reality. They pulled the future into the present by pricing in sky-high expectations for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and all the associated tokens. Perhaps those expectations will be met some day, when these things mature, but 2017 was far too early. What kind of damage do you think latest price drop has done to buyer sentiment? Some damage, certainly, but an insufficient amount. The naive optimism of 2017 still persists in many ways, disappointingly. How do you feel about the current state and future of lightning network? Fascinating experiment, but one we shouldn’t mortgage the future of Bitcoin on. The beauty of Lightning is that if it fails, Bitcoin will continue to work just fine. I don’t think it will, but I don’t think Bitcoin needs Lightning to succeed. I never felt that Bitcoin was a petty-cash payments network anyway, so Lightning is firmly in the ‘nice-to-have’ category for me. That said, I am paying very close attention to startups building innovative businesses using Lightning, as I think it unlocks a lot of interesting use cases. What are your thoughts on HODLing Bitcoin? It’s just a form of saving. I know saving is not encouraged in American society — people are pressured to buy index funds instead, which I find unbelievably irresponsible — but that’s the consequence of a QE society where the dollar is debased and owning assets is the only way to tread water. It’s funny that economists deride holding Bitcoin as hoarding; do they call holding cash hoarding too? Hoarding = HODLing = saving. It’s just what we do with spare cash when we have some extra, and we don’t have anything we want to buy just yet. Long time preferences are the bedrock of civilization, and we seem to have forgotten that recently. What are your thoughts on alt-coins? Inevitable, and certainly a balance will be found where a handful of alts fill different niches that Bitcoin can’t quite satisfy. It’s unlikely that we just end up with one of these things. But equally unlikely that we end up in a state of digital barter where we have 1000 app tokens. Do you hold any? If not, why? Personally I still hold some Monero and some Tezos from the crowdsale (which I have yet to unlock). Monero is insurance against a world where Bitcoin fails to add privacy at the base layer. I believe it to be the most Bitcoin-like cryptocurrency. It’s humble and does not try to surpass Bitcoin, but rather to complement it. What kind of impact do you think the radical drop in alt-coins will have on their future? There will always be altcoins, and a large fraction of the current crop will die off. But some will carve out a niche as global monies with different tradeoffs from Bitcoin, and that’s ok. I think it’s totally inevitable. I do think that non-Bitcoin cryptocurrencies will experience significant churn in perpetuity, just because none of them have the brand equity of fortuitous circumstances of creation that Bitcoin has. Thoughts on the notion of bitcoinization? It’s happening right now in Venezuela, to some degree. Well, it’s kind of complex. I looked into it, and lots of the LocalBitcoins volumes are actually related to the acquisition of dollars by Venezuelans (held in bank accounts outside of Venezuela or with friends and relatives in the diaspora). The flow, as I understand it, is: take Bolivars, exchange them for BTC on LocalBitcoins, send BTC abroad where they are sold for USD, and hold USD in an overseas bank account. So what we have right now is an citizen-led dollarization facilitated by BTC. Of course some Venezuelans are acquiring BTC for the sake of BTC too. I think genuine bitcoinization can’t happen until we have many more liquid and censorship-resistant on and off ramps, on the ground. P2p exchanges, Bitcoin vouchers, simple wallets, easy tools to allow money-changers to deal with Bitcoin directly — those are all necessary before a weak currency can bitcoinize. But even with this Bitcoinization-lite in Venezuela, Bitcoin is geopolitically important now, for the first time ever. A bitcoinization event is now a matter of when, not if. What Bitcoin startups are you excited about? Casa! Disclosure: we’re investors. I think they’re doing tremendously useful work, both on the hardware side, and in simplifying the UX for lightning. Their key management product is excellent — I’m a user. I’m a fan of OpenNode — I used their 1.0 product and it was excellent. Lolli is driving Bitcoin adoption in an innovative way, to great effect. Underheralded is Hodl Hodl — they have a nifty LocalBitcoins-like exchange which uses 2-of-3 multisig and Bitcoin directly, rather than being custodial. I’m following Azteco keenly as they create Bitcoin vouchers, which I think will be a very important product. And I’m not sure Bakkt counts as a startup, since they’ve raised a ton of money, but I am very excited to see how their physically delivered futures Bitcoin product plays out! What “crypto influencers” do you think get it wrong and why? No one in particular. That said, people who tried to monetize their influence — be it with reflinks or just by straight shilling smallcap tokens — always rub me the wrong way. I never wanted to get a lot of followers — that just sort of happened. I never saw it as a financial investment, just a hobby, and I would never monetize it in any way. When I talk about a startup we’re invested in, I will typically disclose that. Our website also lists our investments. When I talk about Bitcoin, I don’t assume that my tweets move the price, because it’s a multibillion dollar behemoth now. And even then, I rarely will say anything about buying it. I do my best to avoid giving anything that could be interpreted as financial advice, and that’s for a good reason. People take what we say seriously, and I owe it my followers to be balanced. I err on the side of skepticism and cynicism for a reason. What “crypto influencer” do you think get it right and why? I think Tuur Demeester is a great follow, because he’s unfailingly kind and polite, and I’ve never seen him attack people or get nasty. When you think about the amount of flak he gets (after his Ethereum thread for instance), it takes a lot of restraint to stay balanced and refrain from getting nasty. I have had my moments of weakness when I’ve been nasty to people online, although hopefully not too often. What’s it going to take for this Bear market to turn around? I think the budding maturity of the market will begin to show through at some point. For a lot of putative use-cases that relied on a blockchain or a token, there won’t be a turnaround. Just a gradual recognition that the use-case didn’t need a dedicated token, or was too early. For Bitcoin, I think the institutionalization of the market will help turn things around — better exchanges, custodians, data services, you name it – How bullish are you on Bitcoin despite this recent pullback. I think Bitcoin is the most important technology of the 21st century, and I’m unchanged in that belief. I think it will continue to grow in stature and significance for the foreseeable future, assuming no catastrophic bug or failure. Any tips you want to give to people new to Bitcoin? Read carefully for six months before diving in! You don’t to understand how elliptic curves work or how SHA 256 works to understand Bitcoin, but it helps. There’s no hurry — Bitcoin will still be there when you emerge. Be very skeptical and understand that many things are cosmetically similar to Bitcoin but functionally different. The soul of Bitcoin matters, not just the technical details. have Best tips for storing Bitcoin? If you’re a Bitcoin whale, and you want to self-custody, I genuinely believe Casa’s multisig solution is the best way to do it (Disclosure: we’re investors.) It blends resilience — it makes attacks on users much more difficult and expensive — with flexibility. It’s easy to replace keys if they are lost. And it obviates the need for seeds! If you’re just a small timer, a Ledger or Trezor is good enough in my opinion. If you’re a fund or an institution, and you want to outsource custody, again I’m biased but I think the folks at Fidelity Digital Assets are second to none (disclosure: I used to work at Fidelity, although not in that group). They have an insanely good track record in conventional asset custody and they bring that expertise to crypto as well. Name some of your favorite information sources and/or podcasts in the space. I am not a frequent podcast listener but I sometimes tune in to Marty’s and Peter McCormack’s podcasts. Journalists: Kyle Torpey and Aaron van Wirdum are very good. Twitter is of course a great place for info and there are plenty of “top bitcoiners of twitter” out there. There are so many good bloggers, Dan Held, Arjun Balaji, Hasu, too many to list, really. My number one favorite Bitcoin resource is Bitmex Research! They do frankly astounding stuff. I am so happy they exist. Any last words of wisdom? Appreciating Bitcoin takes a lot of humility and restraint. The natural urge is to tear it down and build a better version. To nitpick and suggest a more modern alternative. To launch a new version where you just so happen to own 10 or 20 percent. But there’s a reason it is the most popular and beloved cryptocurrency. Because the circumstances of its birth are unique, and cannot be recaptured. Because the founder walked away from his/her billions. Because its UTXO set has been forged in a 11-billion-dollar cauldron of costliness (that’s the rough amount that miners have spent mining Bitcoin, all time). Bitcoin shuns leaders, can’t be easily governed, and is extremely difficult to co-opt and twist in a direction favorable to special interests. All of this is by design. Loving Bitcoin takes a sublime humility. Shatter your ego and submit! Stay tuned for the next Bear Market Bitcoin Diaries. You can find more volumes and articles here!

Bitcoin Bear Market Diary Volume 9 with Nic Carter

The Bitcoin Bear Market Diaries are a series of interviews featuring various important voices and perspectives in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Each interviewee was carefully selected and asked the same group of questions. The main goal was to provide the world with a collection of commentary and opinions on the state of the current Bitcoin and crypto market. Some of the names you will recognize while others don’t wish for the limelight but have great insight and experience we all can learn from. These interviews are raw and unfiltered with no agenda other than giving each individual their opportunity to speak their mind. If you like what you see, please share with your friends. If something offends you, you should probably X out and find another crypto fluff piece that gives you warm fuzzies. Akin is a veteran Bitcoiner and the cofounder of Azte.co and never minces words when it comes to Bitcoin. Akin Fernandez Name: UK Country: How do people know you? Mostly by on Twitter, soon by . Beautyon Azteco **How long have you been into Bitcoin?**Since 2010. **Best Bitcoin experience?**Running the reference client for the first time, and receiving Bitcoin. Realising that it worked, and that I could build software against it. Understanding that this really was “it”. Worst Bitcoin experience? Waiting for a full node to sync. What do you think is Bitcoin’s biggest threat? Time. Time is the only real enemy Bitcoin faces. Nothing else can stop it or threaten it. What are your thoughts on the various Bitcoin forks? They are all worthless, and a waste of time. What are you optimistic about in this space? I am optimistic about Bitcoin. I am optimistic that it is going to change everything so radically, that the “Bitcoin World” will be as different to the world today as the world before automobiles was different to the world after the Model-T Ford and factory production lines. As different as the world before the telephone was to the world after the telephone was widespread. Biggest regret during the last bull market? None. Bitcoin is not about the markets, which are a tiny handful of businesses in the first world shoehorning Bitcoin into a 20th Century business model. Bitcoin is not about these services (which have their place). Bitcoin is much bigger than them, and has a potential that dwarfs their volumes and influence. much What have you learned during the current bear market? That people still have a lot to learn about Bitcoin, and that there is an opportunity to educate the public and steer the narrative. Bitcoin is still in its early stages; that’s why the market is so irrational. People simply don’t get it yet. And why should they? Bitcoin is hard to understand, because it touches so many disciplines and concepts. Even the ones people think they’re familiar with (what money is and how it works) are upended by Bitcoin. Imagine going back in a time machine and trying to explain an 8 lane highway to early Wildcat California gold prospectors. You could wave your hand across the landscape and try to describe the Slauson Cutoff or the I-10 freeway, and they would just scratch their beards and think you’re crazy. “Stage Coaches without horses? You mean like a steam engine but without rails?” would be their reply. This is what it’s like when you try and describe the Bitcoin world to people who are not familiar with it. “Money without a central authority? Everyone is their own bank?”. This is the normal reaction to normal people’s first encounter with the idea of Bitcoin. Obviously you don’t have to go back to the 1800s to draw a comparison either; the idea of an iPhone was pure science fiction in the 1990s, and now it is perfectly normal to have a supercomputer in your pocket, that has no keyboard, that you can use to “Video Call” anywhere on Earth free of charge. The same people today who think nothing of making a Skype call from an iPhone would have scoffed at the idea if it were put to them in 1990. This is also true of Bitcoin. People hearing, “Fiat money will be abolished. Everyone will be their own bank.” sounds like the wildest science fiction to the computer illiterate, but if you know anything about the history of how software has changed everything, it makes perfect sense that money will fall to the same forces, just as the distribution of books, music, phone calls, photography, mail and everything else that has been “digitised”. A single class of device has totally killed the consumer chemical film industry. In every town there was a drop off location to get your film developed and photographs printed. Now they are all gone, and what’s more, the number of photos being taken has increased dramatically. 14 trillion photos are taken annually and without a single drop of chemical developer to process them. If you asked the question, “How can we create a system where 14,600,000,000,000 photos could be taken, distributed globally at zero cost and taken with a hand held device that anyone can afford” before the advent of the mobile phone, everyone you asked would say that it is impossible, and that the environmental impact of manufacturing the film, processing it, manufacturing the photographic paper and processing it, would be an environmental disaster. And yet, with a single new device, this has been achieved without any side effects. Everyone benefits, and no one is hurt. This will all happen with Bitcoin. Bitcoin will unleash astronomical numbers in every field of economic activity. It will abolish payer fraud. It will make time and cost savings across the entire economy. It will bring literally billions of people on to the financial rails. All of this is achievable right now, thanks to a single clever idea. Digitising money has taken longer because money has special properties and requirements that the other goods and services don’t have. Now that Bitcoin exists, this missing piece of the service pie is complete. The same devices that have cause a complete change in how photography and other things are done will now be done with money, on the same devices where everything else is taking place. Anyone who gets a glimpse of even a small picture of the potential cannot help but be very excited by it. With all of this in mind, the price of Bitcoin today is ridiculously low; even at its all time high of $19,000 it was ridiculously low. What is the biggest fail you have seen during the bear market? The bear market. Do you see what I did there? What do you think helped trigger the current bear market? Immature systems, immature markets, the wrong demographic at the levers. Market traders are not Bitcoiners, infrastructure builders or long term thinkers. What kind of damage do you think latest price drop has done to buyer sentiment? Buyer sentiment is irrelevant. Price drops are irrelevant. Damage is irrelevant. We are Bitcoin. You will service us. How do you feel about the current state and future of lightning network? Feelings are irrelevant. Lightning is working and expanding rapidly. It will do what it was designed to do, and it changes everything. Now all the predictions about consumer Bitcoin have another route to fulfillment. Billions of Micropayments, machine to machine payments, and every other fantastic use case are now 100% achievable, at a scale that was previously believed to be impossible. And this is the key takeaway; if you base your thinking on and not and history, you will most likely underestimate what is possible. Be careful about saying something is impossible. Be careful about using past experience as a limiting guide to future performance or characteristics. All of the people who used the TPS (Transactions per Second) pretext for saying that Bitcoin could never compete with AmEx/VISA were totally wrong, and now they are proven wrong. Anyone with the correct experience could have seen this, and was reluctant to say “Bitcoin can’t scale”. belief facts What are your thoughts on HODLing Bitcoin? This is like asking, “What do you think of saving money?” Everyone needs to eat, everyone should save money. How much you save and how much you spend on steak is up to you. No one in their right mind saves money and never spends it, living as a hermit in a cave eating moss because they’re saving their money; money is a tool that serves you, you should not serve money, or live for it. When Bitcoin is the only money on Earth, everyone’s relationship with Bitcoin will be normal, and the balance between saving and spending will be rational. Because the money (Bitcoin) is sound, it will be worth saving, because inflation will have been abolished. The consumer society of throw away goods, waste, short term thinking will be wiped away by Bitcoin as money, because saving will be a rational act again. You will be able to plan for tomorrow, or even twenty years in the future, knowing that your money will still be able to buy the same amount of goods. This is what life was like before the end of the gold standard, where the salary of the man of the house was sufficient to provide a prosperous life while storing up savings. What are you thoughts on alt-coins? **“**Intelligent people don’t think about alt-coins.” — Anonymous Do you hold any? If not, why? I have never touched an alt-coin and never will. I am aligned with the purpose of Bitcoin, because it is rational, and correct. People who are not aligned with the purpose of Bitcoin, and who use logic like, “I can buy a whole DerpCoin for $10 but only a fraction of a Bitcoin, so DerpCoin is better value” (that’s a quote from a real person by the way) don’t understand what Bitcoin is for or how prices or money work. Even discussing alt-coins when talking about Bitcoin is an infamia. What kind of impact do you think the radical drop in alt coins will have on their future. Alt-Coins have no future. It’s like asking what future MiniTel has in the age of the Internet, or what future telegrams have in the age of fax machines, or fax machines in the age of email, or photographic film in the age of the iPhone. People don’t seem to understand what alt-coins are; they are all , or copies, of Bitcoin, with different logos and parameters. It’s like making a copy of OSX, stripping out all the Apple logos and text, and saying, “We are in the operating system business”. Apple is far more than just a disc image of the final result of the work of some of the best developers and designers in software; Apple is the software and the ongoing work of the developers and designers working there. Bitcoin is exactly the same; you can copy a snapshot of it, and re-brand it, but that doesn’t mean you’re able to develop anything meaningful, create new tools like Lightning and OpenDime or do anything else. All the companies and individuals feeding back into Bitcoin make it incredibly powerful, reinforcing it, nurturing it and expanding it. forks A picture is worth a thousand words. This site shows exactly what I’m describing. All alt-coins are downstream of Bitcoin and Bitcoin innovation. They can never ever beat or out innovate or out perform Bitcoin. That is a fact. You are free to use them and even profit from them, but if your aim is not short term and shallow, you will eschew alt-coins and concentrate only on Bitcoin. https://mapofcoins.com/bitcoin **Thoughts on the notion of bitcoinization?**It is inevitable, beneficial, essential, lucrative, entertaining and will be highly profitable. What Bitcoin startups are you excited about? Azteco, Samourai Wallet and a new project that was just shown to me that could be very large, powerful and useful. What “crypto influencers” do you think get it wrong and why? I prefer to talk about the principles rather than the people, so I will say that the people who get it wrong are those who are not aligned with Bitcoin’s purpose. They will call for an increase in the block size one month, and then call for it being cut in half the next month. They will say Bitcoin needs governance, but also laud it for its “permissionless decentralization”. They’ll say that it’s necessary that the money supply is fixed, but then be fans of Ethereum. They’ll applaud that Bitcoin is immutable, but cheer when democratic processes and centralised controls are applied to alt-coins. They’ll say that Bitcoin is a revolution that can bank the unbanked, but insert into guidelines they draft (that no one asked for) that KYC/AML should be done by default for all users including those who can’t identify themselves without batting an eyelid. This is just a sample of how people get it wrong, and they will never go away. Thankfully their voices will be drowned out in the end, and in the future you’ll just not notice them. What “crypto influencers” do you think get it right and why? The only people who matter in Bitcoin are the people writing software. They are the ones who have the real influence, because it is the software that makes everything possible. Bitcoin is not about influencers or opinions or feelings; it is about facts set in motion by software. It is about a new class of tool that can turn symbolic logic into action. What people believe can’t be run in a computer; only software can run in a computer. Apple encrypts its devices and protects the privacy of hundreds of millions of people not because anyone believes that that is true, but because it true. No one who doesn’t like Apple can stop its devices from being private by default. is This is not to say that people who discuss Bitcoin and spread correct thinking about it have no purpose; education in Bitcoin is crucial, and Bitcoin cannot spread without it. Books like by Professor Saifedean Ammous have done a lot to pull together in one persuasive work, the thinking and facts behind Bitcoin. Works like this get it right because they tell only the truth, and now with Bitcoin, you have a tool that you can use yourself to verify that what it does is true. “ The Bitcoin Standard ” What’s it going to take for this Bear market to turn around? Psychology, and an explosion in new services that act to set the price. LocalBitcoins is doing huge volumes; that is the real indicator that everyone should be looking at, not some regulated stock market mimicking “Bitcoin Exchange” in the worst jurisdiction for on Earth for Bitcoin. How bullish are you on Bitcoin despite this recent pullback. There has been no “pull back”. 1 BTC = 1 BTC. It’s like asking, “What future is there for the Internet?” after the so called “Dot Com Bubble”. Anyone can look back now and see that the many companies that had been formed back then were worthless, but the underlying platform, the Internet, was totally sound. It has changed everything, without changing very much itself. The same stock market class reality distortion field is warping people’s perception of Bitcoin, just as it did in the “Dot Com” era. The price of Bitcoin expressed on a handful of US exchanges has absolutely nothing to do with Bitcoin, in the same way pets.com has nothing to do with how the Internet works or its future potential. This is the sort of question you’d expect from a Paul Krugman or some other contra-indicator. It is very hard to think abou new tools correctly, and the internet in the 1990s is a perfect example. No one could have predicted WhatsApp or any of the tools everyone takes for granted now, or the devices they work on, and yet at the time, people really thought that, “the Internet was finished”. The language of the financial sector, “Bullish”, “Bearish”, “Pull-back”, “Market Turn-Around”; none of this is appropriate or applicable to Bitcoin. Using that language with reference to Bitcoin is as absurd as using it in reference to email. None of the developers working in it work on Bitcoin projects with an eye on the market, and they will all tell you as much. They understand what Bitcoin is and how to think about it. Price discovery mechanisms will come, but for now it is unwise to believe that the way Bitcoin’s value is determined is definitive or correct. It isn’t. Looking at how it can bank a percentage of the four billion unbanked as a single use case should tell you just how undervalued Bitcoin is today. When you understand that there are one million people in the UK who are unbanked, you get a sense of the opportunity that Bitcoin brings to the table. All of the million unbanked in the UK have mobile phones, which are now cheap as chips. All of these people use money; the question is how to get them on to Bitcoin? Azteco solves this problem for them in the same way these million phone users top up their mobile phones to make calls and get internet access. And there are 60,000,000 unbanked in Mexico and so on and son on. These people will top up their Samourai wallets with Bitcoin in the same way they top up their O2 or T-Mobile phone accounts. They will spend their Bitcoin over the same network they use for calls. And there are many advantages to be had from this process. Because Bitcoin completely eliminates payer fraud, the entire world of ecommerce will open to these financially disenfranchised people and an ecommerce boom will spread across the globe riding on the back of and powered by Bitcoin. If that were not enough, the savings from the elimination of Credit Card fraud alone would be enough of a reason to widely adopt Bitcoin. For these reasons and many others, betting on Bitcoin make perfect sense. It solves so many problems simultaneously, there is no way that it cannot fail to utterly change the world. Any tips you want to give to people new to Bitcoin? Download and get some Bitcoin. Soon you will be able to buy an Azteco voucher to top up your balance in under 10 seconds. There isn’t anything to understand; once you start using it, it will all just make sense. It isn’t any harder than using WhatsApp for the first time. The most important thing is that you’re using it with the best in class tool. Samouri Wallet Best tips for storing Bitcoin? Samurai Wallet, Open Dime, Ledger. Name some of your favorite information sources and/or podcasts in the space. @saifedean on Twitter is a must follow, and his book, “The Bitcoin Standard” is a must read.@bitcoin_matters is that’s pithy. a podcast I do with Shaine Kennedy RideTheLightning⚡️@MediumSqueeze is an unmissable Twitter account.Nick Szabo 🔑 @NickSzabo4 is a valuable and insightful Twitter account. BitMEX @BitMEXdotcom publishes reports that you should never neglect. Any last words of wisdom? How much better is it to get wisdom than gold! and to get understanding rather to be chosen than silver! Proverbs 16:16 Stay tuned for the next Bear Market Bitcoin Diaries. I have some awesome interviews in the queue and will be dropping new volumes regularly. You can find more volumes and articles here!

Bitcoin Bear Market Diaries Volume 2 with Akin Fernandez

Tech from European companies, There were phones from Finnish Nokia, from German Siemens, from French Alcatel, from Swedish Ericsson, There were TVs from Dutch Philips and just much much more. But now in 2019 most of that seems to be gone so where did all the European tech companies go. Let’s find out. “My first question was whether there really is a tech deficit in Europe?” or if it’s just my brain making it up. So, I started searching and I limited my search for the sake of brevity the only consumer-facing technologies so smartphones and all search engines, Yes! Industrial automation and accounting software, No! Here’s what I found, consumer electronics hardware companies are basically non-existent in Europe there are zero major European companies making pcs or gaming consoles and things aren’t much better for smartphones either there is HMD making Nokia phones. Again and a few niche brands exist as well. But all those combined don’t sell as many phones as a b-grade Chinese phone brand alone. Since Philips sold off its TV business Europe also has no mainstream TV or monitor brands left either. Audio Hardware seems to be doing a little better with a few major brands like German Sennheiser still left. But here two European brands are vastly outnumbered and many like Austrian AKG are being sold off to outside competitors. The camera market remains dominated by Japanese and American companies and Europe is barely even in the race with new hardware categories like smartwatches VR and AR hardware or consumer drones and even on the component level. There are close to no European companies at all. So, while there are a few European success stories. I think it is safe to say that in all the major categories European consumer electronics hardware companies are far far far and their competitors from the US or Asia. On the other side, the situation is somewhat better with software and online services. though there’s a big problem here as well. I think it helps to break this category down into three layers Infrastructure layer. platforms layer. end consumer applications layer. Infrastructure is the backbone of the internet and it includes everything from cloud computing to content distribution networks and even domain name services and there are no European companies here that reach a global scale. obviously, geographical distances mean that I don’t know local hosting companies exist everywhere but American companies dominate on the global level with potential competitors only really emerging from China not from Europe and that’s mostly because of China is basically an impenetrable bubble. A bubble that you can watch right here. The platform layer consists of software that enables other software and services to run and all include things like operating systems web browsers app stores search engines and even social media networks. Here if you want to build an app you have to deliver them through these platforms and once again US companies dominate the industry in this space. There is not a single major European platform in any of these categories and the only potential challenges. In the end-user application layer, you know the stuff that runs on top of these other two layers. European companies have actually managed to build quite a few successful products here. European success stories come from companies that develop either a single product or very few of them. Meanwhile in the US and China on top of these specialists, there are also five plus three companies, that I’ll just call general purpose tech giants companies to just do thousands of things at once. They can buy up hundreds of startups a year. Europe has zero companies like that. Europe has a lot of little fish but — no big fish. In summary, Europe is barely involved with the infrastructure or the platform’s layer of software and services and while it does have some success stories with end-user stuff. It lacks the old tech giant’s. So, the tech deficit is real. But why don’t you people just build more successful tech companies? I think this breakdown actually explains a lot this layer the consumer-facing layer is the only one at which Europe seems to be well at least moderately successful. What’s different about it compared to the others is that quite frankly this room for thousands if not tens of thousands of companies here. The more apps and games the merrier anyone with a good idea and a few smart people can sort of create a cool app from their dorm room, regardless of whether these developers come from Europe or the US or India or wherever. With platforms and infrastructure through there’s just much less room and with it less diversity, the world will really only adopt a few operating systems of a few search engines a few global cloud computing platforms and so on everything happens at a much much larger scale with tens of thousands of employees per platform. Suddenly having a good idea and a bunch of smart people don’t get companies anywhere they also need to the right macroeconomic environment lots of investors who are willing to give them money relaxed taxation and privacy laws and endless pool of highly educated people that they can hire and fire as efficiently as possible and so on. This is the key problem, I think Europe is falling behind. With a few of these, There are educated and entrepreneurial people with great ideas who can build great things and various surveys prove that. But this just isn’t enough to reach the heights of Google and other companies. So, I think there are five main reasons for this lack of competitiveness regulation investment climate geography and demographics the attitudes of common European citizens towards technology and the lack of strong startup ecosystems and of course, I’ll have to generalize a lot because of course, these metrics vary quite a bit across Europe. Still starting with the first one, It is fairly safe to say that European legislation especially when compared to that of the US or say China isn’t ideal for tech companies taxes are high which is a straight competitive disadvantage, labour laws are probably strict in the world. Making it hard for companies to fire and fire people which is especially difficult for tech companies where fluctuations are huge and companies would have to hire and fire all the time to adapt to the rapidly changing environments. Privacy laws are some of the strictest in the world to companies like Google or Facebook whose core businesses together every click and every scroll of their users are constantly fighting European legislators even now and having a European company do this on the same scale would be difficult, to say the least. And lastly, there’s also a lot of consumers protection regulation and red tape. So, companies spend a ton of resources on compliance instead of spending it on beating competitors. The Investor climate in Europe is also behind that of the US and China which is especially important for startups. It’s harder for European startups to raise money especially once they grow a little larger as an example, Fortune found that in 2015 European tech startups were funded at the lower revenue multiple of 2.6 versus 3.9 on the US side. So, In general, money is tighter and then, There’s simple geography launching global services just makes more sense in large homogenous markets like the US or China first where an application can reach scale very quickly. Doing so in Europe would require adapting the product to 30 languages legal systems and cultures, Right away just imagine. If a voice assistant like Alexa launched in Europe first that just wouldn’t make any sense, and then there’s also something much more subtle. I can’t really quantify this but Europeans in general just tend to be really pessimistic about both technology and business. That’s why brand privacy laws are so strict. When I had lived and worked in Southeast Asia. I was constantly surprised by how most people, I met there were genuinely excited that new tech companies would solve their problems. Because in Europe most people, I know think of tech companies as the cause for most of our problems not the solution to them. This attitude makes the adoption of new technologies, way slower here than in much of the rest of the world. Now my last reason would be the lack of strong existing startup it turns out that exposing people to existing and thriving ecosystems like Silicon Valley and Shenzhen, Bangalore. Just organically gets them to build new startups and as Europe was a little slower at the dumping of tech trends. And as it is very decentralized there, just aren’t any Silicon Valley or Shenzhen, Bangalore size startup hubs anywhere in Europe yet. It’s a chicken and an egg problem the more tech just creates more tech and less tech creates less tech anyway. I think those five seasons combined to explain why there are no global tech giants here in Europe. It’s just harder to finance, harder to hire and fire people and harder to reach people and scale here in Europe which means that we can build specialists but not all round tech giants yet. And the lack of homegrown Giants also has a pretty major side effect. New technologies that are pioneered by specialists often end up being acquired by the Giants. In start-up terms, this is called an exit and most founders and investors love exits because it means that they can finally cash in on their investments problem. Europe doesn’t have any Giants so most founders and investors are going to non-European Giants exits. In Europe, there is a constant brain drain and that’s kind of my conclusion. I think tech is often struggling to grow really big in Europe and when it does, It often gets acquired by foreign giants. Now I know I have so far sound that’s pretty gloomy but there’s another way to look at this whole situation. As well a lot of what’s bad for companies can be good for people. I mean there are tons of benefits to being a European citizen again this is a generalization but Europeans tend to have longer holidays my friends have 27 days here in Berlin for example. I only had 18 when I worked in Malaysia. There is a huge Income inequality according to Wikipedia and yes I am quoting them deal with it. Europe is about as equalitarian as it gets better unemployment benefits. If it ever comes to that relatively cheap universal health care high-quality education that is free or at least much cheaper than whatever is available in States. Especially great and usually cheap public transportation, better privacy, stronger consumer protections, a protected environment and so on. So, whether you think these things are ultimately worth not having an ultra-competitive tech environment for will ultimately depend on your priorities. In either case, I think it’s important to know what the trade-offs are that we are making anyway. open source

Has Europe lost its tech giants?

It is incredible how much knowledge and experience of other people is readily available nowadays. Inspired by this fact and also recent advancements in AI, I set out on a quest to accomplish a complex task by imitating behavior and working in a procedural way to determine how an algorithm would approach the problem. The last day of the year is usually a good time to recall what we have learned, accomplished since January 1st, possibly what we haven’t accomplished and what we are planning for the following year. Exactly a year ago I challenged myself. Let me share my adventure with you. I hope that it will provide a useful data point and hopefully a source of inspiration for someone. Just to give you a short introduction. I am a researcher. I like asking questions and figuring out how to answer them. My question was this: Given the abundance of human knowledge available online, could one learn something non-trivial in a self-taught (unsupervised) manner just by browsing the internet. While you could quickly say: or , I wanted to do it in a more scientific way. I decided to run an experiment on myself. In this article I will describe what I did and the outcome of this experiment as concretely as possible — because the essence of science is reproducibility, right? Yes! No! Source: Another World, Delphine Software I hope that you are still with me. If so, then I’ll say a little bit more about my motivation. The main reason is the fact that I do research on Artificial Intelligence (AI). More specifically, I am interested in unsupervised learning. This is a kind of AI that could gather data automatically and figure out what to do with it. There is a nice blog post by Andrej Karpathy about trying to classify images manually in order to determine the human performance on data which would available to AI Andrej Karpathy’s efforts with manual image classification I decided that it would be nice to do something like this, but on something more complex. But that was not the only reason. Many times in my life I have heard that you really need formal education in order to do something and that it is essential to get proper training (by someone who is already a master at something). As a consequence, you need to determine your destiny very early in your life and then live with it. I disagree. I think that it used to be the case, but is not anymore. Especially in machine learning community there is an ongoing debate on whether it is necessary to possess an official degree or not. I have a PhD degree in Computer Science, so I might be the right person to say that you don’t need one. What you do need is this: Curiosity Perseverance (this is really important) Ability to determine what is true in the data flood I think I am curious and I can endure a lot, the third one may need some practice, but can be learned. That’s it. OK. So here is the experiment. Source: Another World, Delphine Software THE TASK Assembly of a 2.5-liter 4-cylinder turbocharged boxer engine (EJ257) with Active Valve Control System (AVCS) manufactured by Fuji Heavy Industries. EJ25 engine. Source: Subaru I was lucky to some extent that I had something non-trivial that needed to be done (I had some time I could donate to science). It met all the conditions: I really had no idea how to do this. People told me I was doomed to fail. There was data (unfiltered) available online It looked complex enough that could be used as a proxy problem for something else (I estimated the time needed to accomplish it to be about 100 hours). There was a simple answer at the end YES/NO April 2017, Buttonwillow raceway. I killed this engine then, so I could use it for science. It was dead, so I heard that everything had to be disassembled or replaced. THE GOAL Disassemble, repair, assemble. Run for 10000 miles (when you go to a professional mechanic, they will give you this kind of warranty) THE METHOD Imitate. Learn by watching a single YouTube video. Don’t do something overly clever. It worked (passed 10000 mile mark today). Without further ado, I will describe what I did. If you are not interested in details, you can skip to the end. THE DETAILS In this section I will: Attempt to convince you that the problem is in fact not trivial Show the steps taken Without further ado, I will describe what I did next. (full disclaimer: I changed brake pads previously). As mentioned before, I had almost zero knowledge about this and attempted to reverse engineer what was being done. I could assume that the guy (Frank?) knows what to do, because at the end he starts the engine and it works. But all I could do was to watch and imitate. Try it yourself (the is no commentary and everything is sped up) This is the video I used Based on the YT video, I tried to figure out what are the tools and parts necessary. For that I used and ordered parts which I needed (initially I did not even know what I needed, it turned out that the replacement parts cost me $500). I also found various discussions on , but they were not that much useful as there were either conflicting descriptions or people claimed (again), that only mechanics should handle this. Subaru site Subaru boards My budget for tools was $1000 (to make it realistic). I made a few purchases of Amazon: , ($200), Some other wrenches ($200) and hoped I could figure out how to use them. Engine Crane (~$300) Impact wrench The experiment officially commenced on January 1st, 2018. Part I — Disassembly (Jan 1st — Feb 3rd) The main problem related to this part was to find proper tools and identify all the parts (segmentation?). I also anticipated further issues with figuring out with parts belonged where, so I needed a system to track them. One pretty useful heuristic when solving this task was to identify all bolts/screws and remove them. I also compared consecutive frames in order to determine what was removed. This was little bit like ‘spot the difference’ game. LEFT: 3:01 in the video, RIGHT: ten seconds later From the perspective of imitation learning, I primarily relied on image classification. I actually extracted frames from the video a few times and ran them through reverse image search. The hardest objects were the tools: What is this? Piston ring compressor This one was pretty hard Can of oil Pistons Got this crane of Amazon based on the video Some more complex examples require action recognition: This one is easy Here’s some documentation: LEFT: Jan 1st, 2018. Impact wrench, crane and coffee, RIGHT: Jan 2nd, 2018. Pulled it out, that’s about 15 hours so far and a approximately 5% of the total work. LEFT: Jan 20th. Here I already removed most of the stuff, intake and exhaust manifolds are off, wiring is off, what you see is the front — timing belt with 2 cylinder heads on the sides. RIGHT: Jan 24th. Taking off cylinder heads, removing the camshafts. Jan 25th. Moved inside the house because of rain. LEFT: The block and two cylinder heads. RIGHT: My `workshop`, when I wrote I was doing this by watching YOUTUBE, I meant it! This is the same video linked above. Feb 1st, LEFT: Pistons are out, RIGHT: The block is split and the only things left are the piston rods and the crankshaft. Part II — Diagnosis and fix (Feb 4th — March 14th) Success. I was able to find the root cause of the problem. In order to fix the issue, I needed to replace 4 piston rod bearings. At the same time I decided to get a brand new set of forged pistons and rods, get the crankshaft and cylinder heads machined. Replace timing belt, etc. After all, I was not paying for labor. This part was mostly about figuring out part numbers and waiting. Feb 4th. I disassembled everything. Found the cause. Can you spot a problem? One of the piston rods was lacking a bearing due to excessive wear. LEFT: This is a replacement for the part which failed (rod bearing). RIGHT: New pistons. Part III — Assembly and debug (March 15th — April 17th) The hardest part (as expected). Here, I needed to purchase a few extra tools: A torque wrench ($50) Piston ring gap file and ring compressor ($150) Most of the work was related to figuring out which bolt goes where. The heuristic used here was doing things in the reverse order (I put the parts in plastic bags with time and date during disassembly). There was also a lot of measuring and reassembling things 2 or 3 times, because I missed something. From the AI standpoint, the hardest part was related to the part at 12:24 in the video. I had really hard time figuring out what these numbers mean exactly and what they are used for. Eventually, I was able to link the numbers to the manual I got (RIGHT) SOME more photo-journalism: These are my notes for doing the assembly. You can see how I planned the order and estimated time in hours. Also, the are some references to the Youtube video (i.e. Oil Cooler 19:20 refers to that point in the video). Machined cylinder heads, cylinder walls and the crankshaft. ARP head studs mounted. April 2nd. One of the hardest parts. Took much more time than I anticipated. Adjusting the piston rings required some extra research and math. Pistons expand due to temperature and the gap needs to be just right. LEFT: Preparing to assemble the most important parts — the rotating assembly — RIGHT LEFT: Crankshaft is in the half-case, RIGHT: Pistons are in. Only 40h to go… This part is quite tricky, need to readjust clearances between camshafts and valve buckets before mounting the cylinder heads. 30h left? LEFT: Block prepared for mounting cylinder heads, RIGHT: Cylinder heads in place. It requires quite a lot of strength to torque them properly. Putting timing belt back on was tricky too. Almost done. 15 more hours and it should be ready. Going where it belongs. Just 5 hours left to mount the engine. Part IV— Evaluation (April 18th — December 31st) After putting the engine in, there were a few parts which I had to fix (missing wire, etc). This took me about a day, then we everything ‘compiled’, the engine started on April 18th and today I decided to conclude. During this phase, I tried anything to find an issue, I even used a microscope and looked for something in the oil, but nothing there. Nerdy me: I used a microscope to look for suspicious stuff in the oil every time I changed it. RIGHT: here’s what you can see if you zoom in a lot. What you should not see: pieces of metal (they would have crystal-like structure). I have driven 10000 miles (just passed the mark today) and it still works. I have no issues with it. I also checked the power, it is exactly the same as before. Fuel consumption is even lower. Everything is in order. Conclusion It took about 100 hours of physical labor and probably twice as much time in research (watching that YouTube video over and over again, probably I watched it about 50 times). I believe that AI is changing the world and we will probably see bots learning from videos like this one. The hardest part was getting through the noise in information — there are places where you will see conflicting directions. This is where it is kind of useful to have a PhD degree — you are just trained to do this. Source: Another World, Delphine Software Overall, I can easily say that now I am at least as qualified as some mechanics I talked with before. Changing oil now takes me about 10 minutes. The Real Conclusion If you really want to do something, just do it. The worst is that you’ll learn something and fail, and the best that if you consider what is available online nowadays, it will change your life and give you a lot of satisfaction. Just be prepared to fail a lot and be patient. Happy New Year! Let this inspire you to learn something new in 2019. P.S. Let me know if you would like to learn more about this work. I tried not to go too deep. Future work Armed with this knowledge, this is obvious, I’m now working on using Reinforcement Learning to swap the original control unit with a Neural Net based one:). Just started working on a piece of code which hopefully can provide more power and lower fuel consumption by learning how to control the combustion process — isn’t anyone working on this? CREDITS The paper provided a lot of inspiration. In order to determine if we are capable of understanding human brain by looking at neurons and activations, the authors wanted to figure out if we can understand a microprocessor using same methods. My question is: `Can a programmer understand an internal combustion engine by watching YouTube?` ‘ Could a Neuroscientist Understand a microprocessor’ (Jonas et al.) Source: Could a Neuroscientist Understand a microprocessor’ (Jonas et al.)

I taught myself how to build a turbocharged gasoline engine from a single YouTube video in 100…

And how web 2.0 turned into a manipulative ad-monster This is a complex story. A story where the line between good and evil is blurred. A story where what may have originally been well-intended was warped and ended up having an impact far beyond what could have been originally thought possible. This is the story of Web 2.0, and of social media and digitized news, which have recently come together into a mess of controversy and lack of foresight and are now tumbling down the hill of self-destruction — or worse, irreparable damage to society itself. There is already ongoing discussion of how Web 3.0 will look, having everybody’s online presence associated with an all-permeating virtual identity on the blockchain, which would bring accountability to transactions and more importantly decentralize the content of the web, allowed users to be compensated for the content they generate (e.g. ). That all sounds promising… Steemit BUT! What’s missing, is the fact that the conventional methods through which we access and navigate content on the web — that is, news and information published by media companies, rather than individual users on social platforms — are fundamentally broken. Before we move on to Web 3.0, we need to fix what we already have. The transformation of Web 2.0 into an advertising machine There is a very clear reason why the methods of navigating the web for the purpose of being informed are broken — it’s the one thing they all have in common, and it’s the reason they have not “fixed themselves” to date. That is, the financial priorities of those platforms involved. The biggest names in tech have built their brands on a simple product — Google with Pagerank, and Facebook with a social graph for connecting users. But what made them into the behemoths they are today should not be taken for granted as an inherent quality of their respective products. These platforms, by capitalizing early on the newly opened opportunities of making sense of the sprawling and messy informational landscape of the web, were able to gain large numbers of users at an exponential rate. But users themselves do not sustain a business (which — as it’s easy to forget — is exactly what those platforms are). In order to sustain their business, they needed to monetize, and the easiest way to do so was through ads . By leveraging users’ activity data to serve them ads that they are more likely to click on, these Web 2.0 pioneers managed to grow their revenues and started expanding their operations, tightening their grasp on the flow of information in our society as a whole. Facebook did this well; so well, in fact, that it kept growing and expanding until it became top-heavy with features which are now becoming difficult to maintain — not from a financial perspective nor a user adoption perspective, but from a perspective and an perspective. Since then, other social platforms have adopted similar ad-based revenue models, and have, as a result been subject to the same repercussions regarding quality and accountability. quality accountability Such was the first step towards the disintegration of online information ecosystem. The tragedy of digital news After newspapers started going out of fashion in the early 2000s, news publishers had to find ways to adapt in order to sustain their operations. They found that people were less willing to pay for subscriptions to digital content, and so had to adjust their revenue model. That meant that they had to go the route of most other websites and rely on advertisements to sustain a positive cash flow. The problem is that ads on the web . That, combined with few (or no) paid subscribers, meant that publications had to find a new way to drive new readers to their content. are much cheaper than ads in a physical newspaper “Audiences drove the change, preferring to refresh their social feeds and apps instead of visiting website home pages. As social networks grew, visits to websites in some ways became unnecessary detours, leading to the weakened traffic numbers for news sites. Sales staffs at media companies struggled to explain to clients why they should buy ads for a fragmented audience rather than go to robust social networks instead.” — John Herrman That’s when they started to realize that in order to sustain business, they needed to start promoting their own content with ads, just so they could drive readership to their website (i.e. they had to ads to drive higher click-rate on the ads which they are being ). As such, they needed to publish content that is most likely to receive clicks (just as an ad is supposed to do). The problem here is, the purpose of news was always to inform, not merely to drive clicks. This is where the conflict between financial motivations and quality of content starts to arise. When content is published for the sake of clicks and not to inform, clickbait becomes more and more abundant, reporting becomes , and eventually the perceptions of society become skewed. pay for paid from more and more sensationalized And where best to publish ads than those platforms on which they thrive — social media platforms. Social media is a cause, not an effect, of the broken information ecosystem The situation we have described until now has, on the one side, a social media industry evolving into the largest marketing solution in history, and on the other side, a struggling media industry as a result of the shift to the digital format. When combined, we have an ecosystem of information which rewards To make matters worse, the very mechanics of modern social media are meant to exploit the news content for its own benefit, by altering the order in which it appears in users’ feeds (see ) to maximize user interaction (learning about the user to improve targeted advertising), thereby further skewing the intake of information on the part of users and further driving the need for more and more divisive, sensationalized content on the part of publishers. quantity of engagement over quality of content. Facebook’s opaque newsfeed algorithm Note that all of this is notwithstanding issues of and , all of which are external threats made possible by the current structure of the social media industry (a sub-issue, if you will). data privacy political interference If this is not a dire situation, I don’t know what is. Up to now, there still hasn’t been a feasible alternative implemented to sustain the news industry in a way that will not result in the diminution of the integrity of published information. By simply separating the mechanism of making money from the motivation for writing and reporting, the issue can be solved. But the undertaking of such a task, or the willingness thereof, is apparently easier said than done. There are some efforts underway toward solving this problem via different approaches, one of which is an initiative started by group of researchers and engineers, including myself, called . The goal is to at once revise the way in which we navigate information in a social platform while also restructuring the monetization system to remunerate publishers in a way that does not force them to compromise the quality of their content (i.e. no ads). The Inflo Project If you’re interested in having a say in this effort toward the revision of Web 2.0 and our information ecosystem, we welcome and encourage your input via or . Slack Twitter

Why ads and news don’t mix

A poem to challenge the status quo and empower all of us The world is changingFaster than everTime is compressingAs speedsProgress is staggeringYet also unequalBut drive too fastAnd we forget those we pass technology Innovation is the answerIt is and always wasFrom fire to farmingFrom medicine to marketsHumanity’s had a great runBut don’t you worryOur run is far from done The end of civilizationLoss of reason always causesThe only question nowIs what is this season Creativity killed the catA terrible saying indeedIs innovation a thing to avoidScience not a thing to heedTalk about stupidity and greed Fake news is a problemThat you already knowA bigger problem stillIs where are we to goOur systemIs crumbling at the seemsWe teach our children nothingBut manage to quash their dreamsA factory job for youOr maybe a coal mineWe’ll stick you in a cubicleAnd make you count the timeMaybe then you’re worth itMaybe that’s all there isBut let’s be fucking seriousWe all deserve better than this education Do what you loveIt’s an old clicheBut there’s more truth in itThan anything a politician will sayThe nature of work is changingEveryone can seeBut why is that a bad thingAre cubicles so grandIn a world of connectednessOpportunity’s in your hand The beauty of workIs that you can createGandhi said to “be the change…”And now a future you can makeForget what they tellIt is all a load of liesThe worst part about “good advice”Is that they really tryBut we’re all individualsEveryone uniqueSkills and interests and passionsAre things we HAVE to keep Can we reinvent a wayTo teach our children rightOne without meaningless problemsKeeping them up at nightA way to performanceNot riddled with RitalinSomething unique to themYet well-rounded tooIs it too much to askFrom folks like me and you We certainly have the moneyBut do we have the willIs there anything more importantIt is hard to see whatBut I’ll be honestIt’s all fun and gamesTil we cut military spendingTo build an army of brains Thinking critically, the ability to problem solveThat’s what makes us humanSo why are we starting to devolveFeels like we’re going backwardsAs technology races onIs this all there isWill we learn to carry on It is becoming more dividedPolitics can’t uniteInstead we’re quickly runningTowards a world without lightWhen did the land of freedomBecome a game of chanceWhere the parents you were born toSaid if you got to learn, play and dance Imagine a world without learningA bleak prospect indeedYet imagine something still worseA world where you’re forced to readBooks that are boringSubjects without meritHomework and exams with one purposeTo order us in a lineNot something relevantNo, no you seeJust picking a numberIs good enough for meFor that’s what you areJust a number in lineThe factory needs workersSociety says that’s fineSo grab your golden ticketJust 12–16 more yearsPlenty of time to learnAbout suppressing tearsAnd then there’s the debtIt’s monopoly money they sayUntil you find outIt is never going awayThere’s no forgivenessThe collector’s are like sharksThere’s no escape‘Cept a shit job in the darkAnd talk about passionIt’s been purposefully killedDreams spayed and neuteredNo chance to growNo chance for innovationNo chance to knowWhat could have beenHow the world could have changedIf someone had just given you a hand Fuck this I sayGet your head out of the sandEven an ostrich could seeThis system is crippling manCreativity and passionPurpose and oomphThe world of tomorrowTakes no prisoners chumpIt is up to youSociety can’t tryWhen we come to togetherOur dreams go to dieSo I have a challengeOne short little thingWhat is the life wantThe one that would make you singSpontaneous excitementWonderous applauseI’m dancing and singingFor an important causeWhat is it for youThink hard my friendYou life is on the line Success and happinessThey’re one in the sameThey’re following your life’s purposeAnd creating your own gameSo if this does anythingI hope it makes you thinkIs that white picket fence Really all you thinkOr is there more in storeThat I don’t knowBut if you follow someone else’s pathYou are sure to forgoEverything of substancePurpose and meaning too I wish you luck my friendI’d help you if I couldBut the only path to greatnessIs setting out from shoreExploring new landsAnd changing as you go. Hope you got something out of this and it makes you think outside the box. If you enjoyed this, please Clap it up and subscribe to my newsletter to get more great articles and occassional event invites. And if these topics interest you, be sure to subscribe to , the podcast where I bring the world’s top minds in AI, genetics, space, longevity, ethics and more to discuss the direction of humanity and the big problems facing all of us. Fringe.FM You can subscribe on | | | | | or . iTunes Stitcher Overcast Google Podcasts Spotify Youtube any other Android app/player If you got something actionable or valuable from this post or are excited about the round table, go ahead and “Clap” below .

Education — A Tragedy

👀 Disclaimer: While trading techniques such as short and long trading can provide investors with profits during market turbulence; they should only be reserved for the most experienced traders who have a good grasp of the concepts. It is highly advised, that investors and traders unfamiliar with the techniques either avoid such trading patterns or thoroughly DYOR The most recent price correction within markets has had the crypto community feeling very anxious recently, and rightfully so, with $20 billion wiped off the market capitalization over the course of the past week. However, despite these losses, current market circumstances can provide seasoned traders to realize profits through these downturns. Using , more specifically via BTC long trading, I was able to accumulate healthy profits during the dips. Huobi Global’s margin trade function Markets Bloodbath 📉 ‘The crypto markets seem to hit panic mode’, would be a very apt summarization of the most recent downturn. With over $19 billion wiped off the market capitalization in under 24 hours, investors abruptly initiated mass sell-offs plunging the markets to yearly lows. At the lowest point, total market cap fell below $200 billion, for the first time in 2018, the lowest figure since November. Bitcoin dropped below $6000 while Ethereum and Ripple were among the hardest hit as the price of Eth dropped nearly 18% overnight, recording new lows not seen since August 2017, trading at $264. Ripple likewise set a new yearly low, dropping 14% to trade at $0.26. A sea of red descended over the crypto markets | Source While it is difficult to state specific reasons for this market downturn, a combination of various news and factors have contributed to the selloff. Samson Mow, chief strategy officer Blockstream Corp, stated, ‘Most cryptocurrencies have been overvalued for a very long time…it’s the opposite of last year, instead of FOMO; people are piling out as they sense panic.’ Back in June when the market rallied, specifically Bitcoin on the hopes that a Bitcoin backed ETF would be approved. However, the SEC has yet to sign off on such events and this had coincided with the increasing concern that ICO projects who raised funds predominantly in Eth are now liquidating the currency for crypto projects. The markets 70% low from the January highs is reflective of investor’s frustration over incremental inroads into commerce and a general stagnation in speculative investments. Potential Market Rebound? 📈 While many would say trying to predict the crypto markets is a fool’s errand, the ferocity of recent price movement should naturally lead to an upturn in prices. With many of the altcoins having dropped in excess of 50%, a small surge in markets is somewhat to be expected. The corrective rally, however, has no definitive length and might not be as strong as investors hope. Despite the yearly lows many currencies have reached, the current prices don’t seem to be warranting such lows. There is a general sentiment that adoption is stagnating somewhat and more obviously there is a strong reliance and almost expectation that a Bitcoin ETF will be approved. However, despite the rejection of the Winklevoss ETF, which was expected, markets continued to bleed. This was even more puzzling as some the best crypto-related news has been released over this time period, such as and further regulatory progression in countries such as and the ICE, the owner of the NYSE has been working on a Bitcoin platform South Korea UK. 📝Using Huobi Long Strategy For Profit This is the trading strategy where traders will buy an asset/share/currency and hope the price will go up, as they will be going ‘long’. For example, if I go long on 100 shares of ABC stock at $10, the transaction will cost me $1000. If I’m able to sell the shares at $10.50, I will receive $1050 and a net profit of $50, minus any trading expenses. This would be the ideal scenario for a long trade. Alternatively, if ABC stock price drops to $9.50 and receives back $950 on the $1000 trade, I lose $50 plus any trading costs. Long Trade: Most recently towards the end of June to Early July, there was a price rally within the markets. Total market cap increased by over $45 billion, from $235 billion to $280 billion. The markets suffered large dips late June, followed by a substantial rally early July | Source It was during this upturn I was able to go longing with Huobi and execute some BTC long trades. 1. On June 29th using margin trading, I loaned $2000 worth of USDT to go long on BTC, placing the order via Huobi Global. 2. The order was placed at when BTC was around $5800. 3. I then set my limit order to 100% of funds at $6600. The dip allowed for a very good opportunity to make a long trade at $5480 | Source 4. As soon as the BTC price reached $6600 on July 2nd, my long order was executed and all my funds sold. The ensuing surge in prices, meant my long trade was a success | Source 5. So from this if I do the calculation: 2000/5840 = 0.342465 0.342465*6600= $2260.3 $2260.3–0.3% (marginal rate of interest) = $259.49 So as shown, I was able to earn a healthy profit via my BTC long strategy. Please remember that I was able to loan $2000USDT for the BTC purchase as I was prepared to lose that investment, should the price go short instead of long. Only invest as the old adage goes what you can afford to lose. Advising A Future Strategy ⏲ Readers of this article, interested in better positioning themselves for a possible rebound in crypto prices, have the options of doing so. When trying to achieve the most beneficial foundations for a potential price surge, readers should: A Comprehensive Analysis Of Trends In Price While a large dip in prices, especially over a very short term, will often lead to a corrective rally, this doesn’t always correlate. Examine previous losses and see how the recovery played out. Also pay particular attention to any significant news, which could have either a positive or negative effect; especially in the current market where a slight sentiment, either way, tends to result in fairly major moves in the market. Have Funds Available While this may be difficult, especially in a severe flash downturn, keeping funds ready for events such as the losses we are experiencing is always advisable. Due to the highly volatile nature of crypto, keeping accessible funds for both long and short scenarios would be advantageous. Now, margin traders might be happy to borrow, but in any case, investing what you can afford is key. Begin With A Smaller Position While it may be tempting to go long on a large position, particularly when the majority of altcoins are hitting new record lows, however, this instinct needs to be kept in check. Consider a buying position, a half or even less, of your normal investment amount. Keep focused on current news and information and by starting with a smaller position, will help reduce exposure to bigger losses if you placed the order a little early. How Marginal Trading Can Boost Returns 💹 Margin Trading means leveraging your position to purchase stock or currencies. It’s similar to that of a loan from the exchange. It allows traders to purchase more currencies that they would’ve been able to normally. Margin trading is available to the existence of the lending market. In our scenario, the lender will be the exchanges and they will provide loans to traders, providing them with the ability to invest in larger amounts of coins. The benefit to the exchange is the interest on these loans. Buying on margin is an illustration of applying leverage to maximize potential profits in the case of a price rise. As an example: The reader thinks the price of a coin, say Mooncoin, currently valued at $20 will increase in value. They want to buy 100 shares but only have $1000. If the reader insists on buying the full 100 shares, instead of the 50 they are able to afford, the reader can borrow the extra from the exchange, say , on margin. If the price rises, in line with the expectation of the reader this is the best outcome. If Mooncoin goes to $30 per coin, their investment will be worth $3000, and the margin loan will be liable for $1000. If the portfolio is sold, the total amount will pay the loan and leave the reader with $2000. By using margin trading the reader has double their money. Huobi Global Leverage, when used correctly can provide substantial profits for the trader. But it must be acknowledged that it is still debt, so please be aware that the outstanding amount will need to be cleared eventually 🤘 🤓 Disclaimer: Please only take this information as my OWN opinion and should not be regarded as financial advise in any situation. Please remember to DYOR before making any decisions Hi, my name’s Sal. ♂️ If you found this article useful and would like to view my other work please be sure to clap and follow me on medium!😎

How I Profited During The Market Downturn Through Long Trading

There are many reasons to be concerned about . Maybe you have friends who can’t hold a conversation without reaching for their phones. Maybe you have neck pain from wasting too much time online. Maybe you have a gut feeling that we’re helpless against the barrage of endless notifications and addictive platforms in our daily lives. screen addiction These all ring true for me, at least. But I don’t think we’re helpless, and I don’t think “screen addiction” is exactly what we should be fighting. I believe that people building consumer-facing platforms can turn these screen-related problems 180 degrees by focusing on their content. When platforms are filled with valuable content for users, screen addiction will no longer be relevant. I’ll elaborate — but first, I want to back up a bit. The current state of technology is kind of ridiculous Today, we have free, instant access to the most comprehensive of history. We have the ability to to anywhere in the world. We can with people in our lives no matter where they go. Hell, we can even to our doors if we tap our phones in a certain way. encyclopedia virtually travel stay connected teleport groceries Screens are granting us luxuries we wouldn’t have dreamt of 20 years ago. So how come they’re ? ruining our lives You are the product and you are losing An important distinction to note is that screens aren’t it’s that they’re making our lives . Worse enough so that, despite all the amazing innovations that we can access through screens, we’re still complaining about them. not making our lives better — worse Our kids start playing video games and can’t stop. Our teens are getting less sleep, more obese, and more lonely . Our is suffering due the the time we spend on social media. We can’t eat at a restaurant without instinctively checking our phones. But we can’t fight it, because in exchange for all the free content online, we’re paying in our attention. than ever mental health What consumer-facing tech companies want from you is to use and love their product. Within products that are content-reliant, that profit the longer you stare at them (i.e. social media and sharing platforms), that means platform designers spend their days prototyping and testing every detail of a product, from the curviness of a “read more” button to the number of notifications you’ll receive, all in order to optimize your experience (i.e. for in your brain). dopamine hits There are many seemingly benign features that are wickedly effective in keeping us — think Netflix’s autoplay from episode to episode, Instagram’s bottomless feed, or even the variable “rewards” (likes, comments, etc.) we collect when we get a notification from Facebook. If you don’t think they’re working, look at the stats: in 2018, 40% of social media users reported that they would find it difficult to stop using social media, up from 28% of social media users just in 2014. It gets harder and harder to “just set your phone down” when every app on your phone has been carefully crafted into a different high-tech drug to try. hooked 4 years ago Netflix makes it easier to keep watching than to stop. We, as consumers, would not win a war against technology. The future of tech is at stake The fact that we the products we use are manipulating us isn’t helping the tech industry at all — it adds to all the scrutiny around Silicon Valley concerning privacy, security, and the impending sense of . know dystopian doom But for those of us in the tech industry, we would be lying if we said that we’ll stop building addictive products. In fact, we’ll be working on more and more attention-grabbing products as more people spend more time on their devices. But if users of some product X gradually start to feel that their behavior is being manipulated (or if they, say, read a about why X is making their life worse) this could push them over to quit. Remember ? Even (or perhaps especially) the biggest companies aren’t immune to public backlash. This public distrust around tech has the biggest potential to . Business Insider article #deleteFacebook weaken the industry That’s why I believe we need to go back to the heart of what we’re building. I believe that (that means anyone from an engineer, designer, PM, to a data scientist, content strategist, executive) And an extremely significant but oft-overlooked aspect is focusing specifically on people building consumer-facing platforms need to feel the responsibility of creating something that is hooking people on. worth the content on their platform_._ “Every Way Kylie Has Changed Since Becoming A Mom” Sorry Kylie Jenner, but I’m not going to gain much by spending my virtual time with you. Snapchat’s Discover isn’t helping — a few months ago, I clicked on a few selfie videos of celebrities doing boring everyday things, and now that’s all I see. Keeping up with the Kardashians — Snapchat style But Snapchat is clearly doing something right, if it’s American teens’ . But maybe if you’re a Snapchat user, you already understand the over the redesign caused by the decrease of focus from your actual friends. I’m guessing that with increasing pressure to monetize and redefine their role as a “camera company” (whatever that means?), Snapchat really wants to show me more Kardashian videos. app of choice backlash Let’s be clear: the fact that Snapchat is trying to form more partnerships and introduce new opportunities for cash flow doesn’t directly bother me. What bothers me is that the content that they’re trying to get me to watch . I trust that they know what direction they want their business to head. sucks But it’s not just Snapchat. Other examples: YouTube has a ton of great quality content, but I always see the same kinds of talk show segments, BuzzFeed videos, and “YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN…” clickbait on the homepage. Facebook has been ridiculously useful for organizing events and reconnecting with old friends, but my newsfeed now 95% GIFs and meme videos that make my CPU fans go wild. Not that this content is inherently malicious or evil or even , but in the longer term, I feel awful after wasting hours on them. that bad Snapchat’s users wouldn’t be so angry at the redesign if the stuff on Discover was as interesting or relevant as their friends’ Stories. People wouldn’t see and as enemies against their hard-earned free time if they saw more valuable content. YouTube Facebook This is a content problem. Content is the main distinction between products that are worth being hooked on, and products that are worth being hooked on. A content problem can’t be solved like a bug fix. It relies on constant effort from the people building the platform to promote valuable content. not First, what is “valuable content”? Before I define anything, I just want to acknowledge that this is purely my overarching idea of what makes content valuable. I think it’s important for people working on different platforms to explicitly define their specific idea of “valuable content.” extremely Okay, back to it: In general, I believe that content (whether it’s in the form of a video, a scrollable feed, a game, an informational app, a collection of writing, a VR environment, or really anything else imaginable) is valuable if it benefits the user’s health and happiness in the long term. More specifically, some ways to accomplish this include: facilitating meaningful social interaction, supplying educational value, incentivizing healthier habits, or promoting productivity. I’ll expand on these below. We don’t talk anymore is anything that allows you to form closer relationships with others. Often, that means that the platform must bring you together with others, face to face, which provides more interpersonal communication. Today, we’re lucky to have various messaging channels to communicate with our circles, but we become when we allow these channels to replace offline communication. But products that aren’t purely intended for facilitating in-person interactions can still encourage in-person interactions. Imagine if a social media site had a “Form a meetup” checkbox next to its “Post” button, so you can choose to post something that could lead to a fulfilling conversation in real life. Meaningful social interaction rewarding less happy To live is to learn… Important fundamentals along with top-tier instruction on specialized academic areas are readily . But even on more general social platforms there are a ton of opportunities to disseminate interesting information — I love watching TED talks on YouTube for example, and I’ve learned some really interesting facts even in the jungle that is . From the bottom of my nerdy heart, I believe that integrating educational content on creative platforms has potential to make learning infinitely more fun. But it goes past that — when people read others’ insights, ideas and stories online, they broaden their own perspectives. And in a world with so much division and prejudice, educating each other should be an immediate concern. educational available online reddit The health craze can be virtual The category of platforms that make you includes anything that improves your quality of life in the long term. On the health side, it can be anything relating to nutrition, , exercise, or even emotional or stress management. Especially as screens encourage many unhealthy habits — sitting excessively, neglecting sleep, neglecting ourselves — this is becoming increasingly important if we want to avoid racking up medical issues. more healthy sleep support Getting shit done Products that help us be allow us to spend more time doing what we care about. Something that eliminates the hassle of mindless everyday tasks makes you more productive. Something that helps you clarify and prioritize your goals makes you more productive. Something that allows you to communicate crucial information with others makes you more productive. Even pure entertainment can make you more productive by giving you a much-needed break, but all the autoplay/bottomless feed-esque tricks the keep you hooked for hours could counteract its benefits. In that case, the only case for supporting productivity is simply to reduce those willpower-draining features. There are a lot out there about why and how to do that. more productive of interesting articles How to solve the content problem Okay, these ideas sound nice and wholesome — but how can we turn them into reality? The answer: Platform builders need to work on both the , and the in order to create an environment where valuable content is widely available and accessible. platform itself platform’s content 1. Improving the platform itself This is undeniably very different across different platforms. The following are general ideas to make platforms more conducive to content that is relevant and valuable to each user. “Advanced Options” Giving users more options to customize their content is usually a good idea. That doesn’t mean you have to induce decision fatigue by giving users 30 different checkboxes to click when they first register — you can keep that sleek, user-friendly interface but also make easily accessible advanced options available for people to truly be in charge of what they see. Basing content off of content you’ve already seen is not always reliable — if someone goes on a clickbait spree, that doesn’t necessarily mean that their primary interest is clickbait. Customization options are invaluable to anyone who wants to have any degree of control over the content they see. Curation and diversified default content When I see that stand of as I hungrily walk into Safeway, I’ll think: But while getting a bag of marshmallows won’t necessarily encourage me to add even more marshmallows to my grocery basket, watching gaming videos set me on a path to more gaming videos, especially through recommendations. Smashmallows there’s no harm in getting some! will The tone of our online browsing is set from the very first thing we click on — that’s why default content is so important. Furthermore, the content that most people engage with is usually the most valuable content. So that’s where curation by real humans comes in. not Not-so-curated content on my YouTube homepage I would trust a human over any algorithm today to pick interesting, relevant content that can actively benefit me. Platforms should have content curators pick content synonymous with the mission of their platform, and then increase the rankings of that content on their default and recommended features. Finding good content is so hard and time-consuming for us as consumers to do, which is why platforms themselves should bear some of the burden. 2. Improving the content itself If valuable content is hard to find, then it’s even harder to produce. The content that people contribute most to public platforms isn’t necessarily the best content. On YouTube, if it’s easy to get more views with clickbait, why not make clickbait? Awards and incentives There needs to be a push to create more diverse content, and the platforms themselves are in the perfect position to do that. Right now, YouTube has for people with high subscriber counts and a to monetize videos. They even sponsor , which had over attendees in 2017. Platforms have so many opportunities to recognize content contributors, which means that they have many opportunities to recognize people making more diverse and valuable content, in addition to purely popular content. awards partner program VidCon 30,000 VidCon 2018 (photo credit: VidCon YouTube channel) Another example: Yelp has encouraged many people to leave high quality reviews and photos of local businesses by setting up an for contributors who are especially active. If Yelp can make people write long paragraphs about their local florist, other platforms can encourage the kind of content they want too. Elite program But this is only the tip of the iceberg. There is an infinite number of ideas that content-reliant platforms can use to improve their content over time. Action items A platform with “valuable content” is just a broad end goal. Individuals and companies must consciously define what exactly valuable content looks like for their own platform, and then implement ways to incentivize more of it. To anyone who takes any part in a building a platform, whether it’s engineering, design, leadership, marketing or anything else, . And even if you don’t have a say in any platform, please start thinking about how to actively push for valuable content please spread the discussion so that those who do can make their products worthwhile to you as a user. Why should platform builders even care? I haven’t yet really addressed the awkward question of: It’s hard to see any financial incentive for promoting “valuable content” when users will just as easily consume any other content. why should people working on a platform be responsible for all this? If you’re concerned about what the future might look like, if you believe that there’s even the slightest chance the world could get from the new technologies we’re building — then you have your answer. Without pressure from the builders of the platform, platforms will continue to look the same, make the same mistakes, incur the collective anger of the public after it has interfered with their lives enough, rinse and repeat. worse I truly believe that the most sustainable consumer is not composed from virality or novelty — they stick around because they are innovations that really make our lives better. Look around you — we still use blenders but we don’t use . Similarly, making platforms conducive to valuable content is key to ensuring its success and longevity. technology Juiceros A final analogy Let’s first look at some alarming facts about our relationship with screens. A man in Taiwan from exhaustion after playing video games for three days straight. Studies have shown that people addicted to the Internet lose matter in the “processing part” (grey matter) of their . We spend over each day on social media and pay an average of per year for technology and communication devices. died brain 1.5 hours $2300 Surprisingly, though, pose similar dangers to us. cars Cars cause millions of accidents every year. Accidents on the road are the of death in Americans aged 10–19, and traffic pollution has actually been shown to in children. We spend around in cars every day and spend over on gas per year. leading cause slow brain growth 50 minutes $2000 But no one would ever say that we’re addicted to cars. This analogy might sound crazy, but we can’t deny that using cars comes with its risks and drawbacks. But we don’t strive to find solutions to “car addiction” because cars solve a significant problem in our lives: they make our commutes much more efficient and our lifestyles possible. Screen addiction in its purest form — spending too much time on our devices — is not the biggest problem. It’s the habit of consumer-facing platforms to promote time-wasting content that’s the problem. But I believe that this problem can be tackled with everything I mentioned above, and also much, much more. Maybe this is awfully optimistic of me, but when the content problem is better solved — when the platforms and products we use are indispensable in supporting and improving our daily lives — I hope that “screen addiction” will sound as ridiculous as “car addiction.”

Screen addiction is not the problem

Bitcoin & alternate cryptocurrencies There are 10 ( binary for 2 ) types of people in the world, those who own bitcoin ( 1 ) and those who don’t ( 0 ). The question that keeps me up every night is, whether Bitcoin, in its current shape and form, be ever used as money? To understand the potential of Bitcoin, it is essential to revisit the concept of money. There is hardly anything that hasn’t been used as money, rock salt in Ethiopia, brass rings in West Africa, cowrie shells in Uganda; anything can be used as money. A need triggers an invention In 6000 BC “barter” was introduced by Mesopotamia tribes. A “barter” is an exchange of goods or services for other goods or services. A farmer may agree to sell his crops to a buyer for bullocks. The farmer receives bullocks ( beneficial for the production of crops ), the buyer gets crops ( food to satiate his hunger ). Simple right, the seller gets what he values; the buyer receives what he appreciates. Here’s how such a simplicity suddenly becomes a burden. Scandinavian and Russian traders bartering their wares. , 1555 Olaus Magnus Suppose, another buyer initiates an exchange of horses for crops from the same farmer. Such an exchange adds unwanted cost to the farmer because the horses do not contribute to the productivity of crops. The farmer must involve in an additional barter to exchange horses for bullocks. The chain of such extra barter grows adding to the unwanted cost in time and effort. We, humans, came up with a reasonable solution to overcome such a problem. “Salt barter” is an exchange of goods or services for goods essential for human survival. In simple words, a farmer would barter crops in exchange for highly demanded goods, such as salt, cow, etc. Although such an awesome idea eliminated problems arising from pure “Barter”, it directed our attention to a new problem, “Store-of-wealth”. “Store-of-wealth” or “Store-of-value” is a function of an asset to be saved, retrieved and exchange at a later time. Salt, cow, etc had a highly inadequate store of value. Salt could be washed away by rain, cows inevitably had to die. Such degradable property increased the difficulty of wealth transfer by inheritance and safe accumulation of wealth. We evolved and so did our thoughts, “Community agreed barter” was established. “Community agreed barter” is an exchange of goods or services for a physical symbol, such as cowrie shells, animal horns, etc. The agreed physical symbol must possess few properties, such as difficult to acquire from nature, and robust to natural degradation. One may argue that symbols fell short on intrinsic properties which “Salt barter” had; cowrie shells could be only used for creating pieces of jewelry. But lack of intrinsic properties did not deter its use as a medium of exchange provided the community agreed. Money Cowry; Length 2.6 cm; Palou Tello, Batu Islands, Indonesia. Chinese shell money, 16–18th century BCE. “Community agreed barter” presented us with a new set of problems, such as the unit of account. The cowrie shells were troublesome to proportionately divide. It worked perfectly until the lowest “unit of account” represented a whole cowrie shell. The value of certain goods was lower than one whole cowrie shell, say half, three-fourths, quarter of a cowrie shell. Failure to proportionately divide for such small exchanges reflected the limitation of cowrie shells. Also, the growth of such “Community agreed barter” in isolation hindered exchange of goods across communities. Community A upheld cowrie shells while Community B upheld animal horns as money. Merchant of community A exchanging horses with the buyer of Community B expected cowrie shells as payment rather than animal horns. Due to the lack of intrinsic value, community A merchant would fail to exchange animal horns with other community A peers. To continue healthy trade across communities, we took a step backward by using “Salt barter”. We knew “Salt barter” was a temporary solution due to the “store-of-value” problems that accompanied such essential goods. We needed to find a commodity which everyone accepted, had an intrinsic value like salt, and would also robustly withstand changes in nature. Then came metal. Metal was “godsend”. Metal was robust against changes by nature, divisible by weight, difficult to acquire from nature, attractive and used to produce weapons, jewelry, vessels, etc. Who would say no to such a shiny multi-facet object? Relative sizes of an 860 kg block of gold ore, and the 30 g of gold that can be extracted from it. , . Toi gold mine Japan Metal achieved all goals, “Community agreed barter” and “Salt barter” set out to solve in the first place, until smart smiths discovered a lucrative workaround. The malleability aspect of metals provided effective divisibility by weight, but the same property was leveraged to counterfeit metals. Metals like gold, had more value, than metals like copper. Smart smiths counterfeited gold by mixing with cheap copper increasing the final weight, thereby increasing the value. Counterfeiting became a considerable problem, essential to be eradicated. Kings saw a tremendous opportunity to gain economic control over their kingdoms using their current political power. They purposed a solution. “The kingdom treasury will issue a coin. A coin is a round metal stamped with the king’s symbol along with the final price representing the round metal. Any entity counterfeiting the king’s symbol would be punishable by death.” A , circa 350–315 BC, one of the earliest example of . Kuru punch-marked coin coinage in India coin from , 620–600 BC. Obverse: Forepart of . Reverse: Square incuse punch Electrum Ephesus stag Thus striking the beginning of centralized economic control. A slight deviation from the story, but I thought it would be wise to mention it in this portion. Bitcoin is decentralized, as well the form of monies used before the kingdom coins. Nature issued metals at a rate it desired, and Bitcoins are issued by the system at a codified rate. Since bitcoin is secured against counterfeiting by cryptographical proofs unlike metals, Bitcoin could have been the perfect form of money to substitute the kingdom issued coins. But today the dollar is made out of paper, not gold. Why so, What happened to coin over the period of years? The coin was the most sound form of medium of exchange we experienced, triggering coinage. Every kingdom issuing their coins flooded the world with many different coins ( even they experienced a fair share of initial coin offerings ). Due to the metallic property of each coin, a coin issued by kingdom A had value in kingdom B vice-versa. Trades between kingdoms boomed, and a rise in the global economy emerged. Despite the soundness of the coin, new problems came under recognition. More wealth resulted in heavier weight in metals, the cost to transport wealth and cost to securely store wealth skyrocketed. The coin also had a volatile intrinsic value of a pure gold represented by weight. A coin holder would melt the gold coin worth 5 and sell the gold to the goldsmith for 6, creating 1 from thin-air ( volatile value attack ). King’s metal coin dethroned by a piece of paper Tang dynasty in China had an elegant solution to coins, “a piece of paper”. Paper was comparably light-weight solving transportation and storage issues, and an honest exchange for a fixed amount of gold weight from the treasury removed volatile value attacks. Song Dynasty , the world’s earliest paper money. Jiaozi “Paper money” had extrinsic enforcement of the value on a piece of paper by Kings, and intrinsic value to be redeemed back for gold. Today, we sugarcoat such a solution as “gold-standard”. As Milton Friedman once said, “With money, there is a tendency of it to grow, for more and more of it to be produced”. Kingdoms became empires, empires united to form countries. Now the federal reserve of each nation had the ability to print money equal to the amount of gold reserved. To stimulate a growing economy or tackle depression, there was a necessity to increase the quantity of money supply. The race to acquire more gold to print more money began. Under a gold bullion standard, paper notes are convertible at a preset, fixed rate with . gold bullion The difficulty in obtaining new gold prevented the printing of new money. The need to increase the quantity of money overruled the gold standard and 1:1 paper-to-gold reserve ratio collapsed. Fractional reserves became a norm to the gold standard, later discarded for the concept of fiat. Today, we use fiat money as a legal tender. Fiat money has extrinsic enforcement and no intrinsic value. Federal reserve prevents counterfeits by advanced printing methods and manages the quantity of money. The dollar has more value than rupees simply due to the independent productivity of both the countries. Federal Reserve money printing machine The cost of printing new money for Federal reserve may be low, compared to the cost of acquiring new cowrie shells from nature. This surfaces a risk for the devaluation of the paper money with respect to goods and services over time, known as “inflation”. The cause of inflation is due to a sudden increase in the amount of money printed, the cure for inflation is to print less. We as citizens have assigned the Federal Reserve an impossible task to accurately measure the amount of new money needed to be supplied for a stable economy. We have empirical evidence how unchecked control over the money supply can destroy economies, with inflation rates more than 500% in Chile and Argentina. Argentina Inflation rate. credit: tradingeconomics.com Chile Inflation rate. credit: tradingeconomics.com Fiat money in hyperinflated countries such as Zimbabwe no longer serves the purpose of adequate store-of-value, hence citizens resorted to other intrinsic commodities for a store-of-value, such as a whiskey, mobile minutes, etc. Zimbabwe banknotes ranging from 10 dollars to 100 billion dollars printed within a one-year period. The magnitude of the currency scalars signifies the extent of the hyperinflation. The largest denomination of a Zimbabwean banknote (Z$100,000,000,000,000) How do we keep centralized authorities such as Federal Reserve accounted for their actions? Milton Freidman purposed a simple solution, Federal Reserve must decide a rule, say an increase of 3~5% in money supply every year and honestly adhere to it. Friedman strongly believed though such a rule would create unemployment as a side-effect in short-run, benefits in a long-run would be tremendous. While the reactionary increase in money supply ( as practiced today ) alleviates economy in short-run with adverse effects of higher unemployment and inflation in a long-run. Friedrich Hayek instead had a radical alternative. Allow an institution to create private money to compete against government-issued money, competition would act as an indirect force on the Federal Reserve to control their monetary policies. The citizen would be the decider, by choosing between government-issued money and private money based on empirical evidence of price stability. Institutions, to issue such private money, had to overcome legal hurdles and faced the threat to be eradicated overnight by government authorities, due to a physical single point of failure. E-gold, a privately issued centralized currency redeemable for gold was shut down due to legal issues. Single point of What? Wei Dai in 1998 through his writings about bmoney, and Nick Szabo through bitgold in 2005 had conceived a novel idea of decentralized private money. Those theoretical concepts began to be codified around May 2007, by Satoshi Nakamoto. Nakamoto elegantly solved the Sybil attack problem faced by decentralized systems by using Adam Back’s hashcash, also known as proof-of-work, enabling a fully decentralized trust minimized monetary system. Nakamoto definitely understood deeply about the ways money could potentially evolve in society, thus motivated enough to build a working software. The bitcoin network follows a codified monetary rule as law with fixed supply, no single authority can alter the monetary rule eliminating the reliance on centralized power such as a Federal Reserve. But how sound is Bitcoin as private money? Due to its decentralized issuance, such private money pays a high cost, of lacking intrinsic value similar to cowrie shells. Cowrie shells were only accepted within a community, bitcoin would also be accepted within a community that perceives bitcoin as valuable. The size of the community is variable, with the upper bound of the global population. Price of bitcoin, on the other hand, would be close to the cost of producing new bitcoins, similar to a commodity. “Selling price of a commodity is higher than the cost of producing it, if the demand for the commodity drops, the incentive to produce the commodity would simultaneously drop.” From a pessimistic point of view, if the price of bitcoin drops below the cost of producing the bitcoin, miners would no longer continue to mine, triggering a reduction in difficult of mining, making it profitable to mine once again. The price will take a hard hit. From an optimistic point of view, since the cost of producing the bitcoin rises, the price of bitcoin should follow the trend. Will bitcoin stand the test of time? The future is an uncertain place, people may merely speculate, but never predict. The safest prediction would be by 2030–2032 either bitcoin would have a massive volume of transactions or no transactions at all. Bitcoin as my own subjective opinion, is a digital cowrie shell, no intrinsic value but accepted by a community as a form of medium of exchange. The same bitcoiners would need to resort to “Salt barter” ( USD ) to trade outside of the community. Bitcoin outdoes cowrie shell by having the property of enhanced divisibility and impossible to be counterfeited guaranteeing security through cryptography. If bitcoin is the “Community agreed digital barter”, then what would be the “godsend” metal coins of the digital age? I believe, its blockchain platforms such as Ethereum, EOS, Ziqilla, Harmony, xGovern, Cardano and directed acyclic graph technology platforms such as Constellation, Hedera Hashgraph. All these digital metals possess intrinsic value, allowing decentralized trust minimized applications to execute on top of them using smart contracts. Pure metals by themselves never were sound money, problems arising from digital metal are similar to the volatile attacks on historical pure metal coins. The value of such tokens ( digital metals ) would drastically increase or decrease relative to the speculative demand for the utility of such tokens. Periodic table for Digital Metals **So are we on a brink of repeating history by “Paper Money”?**Dai can be viewed as an example of “Paper Money”, which is a price stable coin backed by gold-like, Ethereum. Stability of Dai heavily relies on the lower volatility of Ethereum. Even if “Paper Money” does succeed, we have experienced a failure of gold-standard to meet the rise in demand for more money. What’s next? What is the fiat of cryptocurrencies? Reverse Robinhood Few wise men would argue, “Aha! Supply is limited hence the price is volatile. If supply was elastic, the price would be comparably stable similar to fiat.” Nakamoto was fully aware of such a policy in 2009, what prevented such a policy to be codified in Bitcoin, was its reliance on a trusted party to inform the system about the price. Nakamoto once said, “Indeed there is nobody to act as a central bank or federal reserve to adjust the money supply as the population of users grows. That would have required a trusted party to determine the value because I don’t know a way for software to know the real world value of things.” Nakamoto dilemma of software to know the real world value of things was solved by Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum. Buterin in his free time came up with a solution called “Shelling points” to inform about external variables such as the price of coin to the system in a fully decentralized way. “Shelling points” could be an article of its own, for our purpose consider it as a trustless proven fact provided to the decentralized software system. Now for the in history, we have reached a point where it could be possible to build a price stable monetary system, which can be utterly as promised by Nakamoto, always adhered to a as advocated by Friedman, against the monopoly of government-issued currencies as dreamt about by Hayek. first time decentralized rule-based policy privately issued to compete But will we ever witness a real-valued stable privately issued currency? All those fiat policies mimicking stable coin projects such as Basis, Havven, Reserve, Nubits can perform fancy tricks such as inflation, contraction, constant buy wall, continuous sell wall, artificial market manipulation, and yet fall short compared to fiat. The core reason is that they lack intrinsic value, and heavily rely on faith. Faith can be acceptable only when its blind, educated faith crumbles with the first sign of fear. When dollars gets debased we revolt against the government, because we falsely believe about the responsibility of centralized authority such as Federal reserve to maintain price stability of dollars. In case of decentralized stable cryptocurrency experiments, there is no centralized authority, when the price goes south at the expense of poor coin holders of third world countries, who would they revolt against? Would we ironically turn our hands towards the government to clean up the mess left by those who dreamt to compete them? On a finishing note, the cryptocurrencies that can come closest to compete against fiat money would be intrinsic value backed inflationary cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum, and its competitors. The volatility issue of them can be elegantly solved by value-redeemability. As I once said, “The future is an uncertain place. I can merely speculate, but never predict”. Anvay Rane Bored or hated the article? Smash some tokens, might help undo the boredom http://www.tokensmash.io/

Bitcoin about to redefine money again?

1. Introduction A Statistical Analysis of ICO Performances in Differing Market Conditions These past several months, an analysis of ICO performances in the midst of varying market volatility was conducted by the data science team at Lunar Digital Assets. Intuition would probably lead a typical retail investor to believe that an ICO will perform better in bull markets as opposed to bear markets (and in stable markets which are void of any particular direction). A Survey of 288 Crypto Investors At the inception of the idea for this study, we were curious to see what cryptocurrency traders and ICO investors thought regarding the performances in bull and bear markets. So we asked various networks of traders and investors a fairly simple question. The results were astoundingly favored towards bull markets, as most would expect. However, it should be pretty noteworthy that 29% of those surveyed disagreed with the majority. (29% because the 12% that voted for “Anytime” would be investing in bull markets as well.) In hindsight, we probably should have had “I don’t know” added to the list of choices. When’s the best time to be investing into ICOs? (Survey Results) Bull Markets: 171 (59%) Neutral Markets: 40 (14%) Bear Markets: 35 (12%) Anytime, doesn’t matter: 33 (12%) Never: 9 (3%) Note: This was not a scientific survey. In this analysis, we aim to bring credence to or dispel this commonplace notion using statistical analysis and hypothesis testing. We strongly believe that this study is especially helpful in the relatively young market of cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings, whereas traditional financial markets have a much longer history and established patterns and trends. We will attempt to answer the question that : everyone thinks they know, but doesn’t really know Do ICOs really — statistically — perform better in bull markets? 2. Data Scraping, Cleaning & EDA Data Overview and Exploratory Analysis: Finding reliable data in this fragmented, young market can be challenging. The data for this study was acquired from , which provided a sample data size of 457 initial coin offerings. Although we are aware that there were many more ICO’s conducted, we believe that 457 is an ample size to draw inferences from. Coinist was also the only data source that readily had ROI information (the figures were also spot checked for accuracy), and went as far back as 2013 up until the data the captured in May 2018 when this study was being conducted. Coinist As basis of analysis, we will be using each coin’s Return on Investment (ROI) since the ICO Ending date as a measure for investment performance. Due to the varied nature of ROI across ICOs, I will be using a common logarithmic function (Base 10) of each coin’s ROI as reasonable means of comparison. This is especially useful as we are concerned about relative performance in different market conditions and not an associated scalar value. Captured Data Name of Coin 1-Hour % Change 24-Hour % Change Weekly % Change ICO Date (last day of token sale) ICO Price Current Price ICO Return on Investment (ROI) Data Cleaning We did not find any major issues with the data other than one mislabeled adte for the coin APX. The ICO date was set to May 21, 1970. While cross referencing with other sources, we had determined and fixed the APX ICO date to May 21, 2017. Outliers: NXT’s overall ROI of ~24,000% was an obstacle to proper comparison and analysis. Despite being a significant outlier (the next best performer was Ethereum at ~1,900%), we decided to keep this data and regularize it via a common logarithmic function for analysis. Exploratory Data Analysis The goal of is to visualize the data in different perspectives to glean additional insights for further analysis, anomaly detection, and data consistency. In this section, we will visualize the data from a high level. First, we wish to explore the pace of ICOs and visualize the rise of ICO as a means of capital funding: EDA We see a staggering yet unsurprising increase in ICOs in 2017 followed by a decline in 2018 YTD. However, we would not be surprised to see the annual 2018 value exceed 2017’s ending tally. It should be noted that since the data was taken in May, as predicted, the number of ICOs is steadily rising. More EDA: Visualizing Winners and Losers Dividing the dataset into losers (where an ICO’s current price is below its ICO price) and winners (where an ICO’s current price is at or above its ICO price, shows that the losers (314) outpace the winners (144) by a ratio of almost 2:1. Yearly ROI Our dataset captures the following years and the associated numbers of ICOs held in that year. The below violin plot provides a visual summary of statistical descriptors of the ROI performance by ICO Year: Refer to below for key. Visualization Key Median Value White Dot: Interquartile Range Thick Candle: 95% Confidence Interval Thin Candle Whisker: Kernel Density Estimation Width: Monthly ROI On a monthly basis, ICOs that end in April have the best median performance but also likelier to perform the worst of any month other than December. Otherwise, there does not seem to be a significant difference in ICO performance based on Ending Month. ROI by Market Conditions Another important distinction to consider when analyzing ICO ROI was whether or not the ICO occurred in a bear, bull, or purgatory market environment. Date ranges were leveraged from Thomas Lee, Head of Research at Fundstrat Global Advisors. Please also note that any date ranges not included are considered “purgatory runs.” The date ranges were applied across the ICO dataset to classify each ICO and their respective ROI as belonging to a bull, bear, or purgatory market. Bull Runs 06/17/2015–07/12/2015 02/07/2016–04/05/2016 03/18/2017–06/16/2017 11/12/2017–01/13/2018 Bear Runs 07/13/2015–08/29–2015 04/06/2016–05/29/2016 06/17/2017–09/21/2017 01/14/2018–03/18/2018 Any ICO that does not fall into the above ranges are classified as purgatory. The date ranges were then applied across the ICO dataset to classify each ICO and their respective ROI as belonging to a bull, bear or purgatory market. When taking out the year dimension of the view, the plot suggests very little difference in median ROI performance. The plot suggests very little difference in median ROI performance, but one very odd statistic was that and purgatory markets see more outliers of positive performance (likely due to NXT’s ROI as the coin had its massive run-up in a purgatory market in 2013). bull markets see more outliers of negative performance It appears that the market conditions do not have a significant impact on the median returns of ICO’s. Now we can move on to see if, , ICOs perform better in bull markets than in bear markets. on average 3. Methodology and Statistical Analysis Medians and Averages are NOT the Same! The primary method of analysis used to assert our assumption is a hypothesis test using a Z-Test. In order to appropriately perform the test, we require that the distribution of the data be unimodal and normally distributed. In our sampling method, the sample size must be larger than 30 and our samples be independent. We find that each market environment contains 173 ICOs during a bull market, 143 during bear markets and 142 in purgatory markets. As a result, our population and ensuing sample sizes will be greater than 30. Moreover, our population samples are assumed to be independent. To assert our data is unimodal, an Exponential Cumulative Distribution Function was constructed. The theoretical model takes the mean and standard deviation of our ROIs and plots hypothetical data points. We compare this with the actual plot of our ROI data. In the below graph, we find that our real data is closely aligned with the ideal model and thus can be assumed to be unimodal and normally distributed. The goal of our statistical analysis and hypothesis test is to determine whether ICOs, on average, perform better (has a higher average ROI) during a bull market than in a bear market. To accomplish this, we need to construct the confidence intervals and then the hypothesis test parameters. We begin with establishing a 95% confidence interval to provide insight on the range of differences that we can observe. Taking 100 random samples from the Bull and Bear populations, the difference in the mean is -0.159. At the 95% confidence level, the difference in Logarithmic ROI can range between -0.52 and 0.21. For our hypothesis tests, our statements will be expressed as: Where μ1 is the mean bull market ROI and μ2 is the mean bear market ROI. D0 will be 0 (zero) to signify the difference in the means. Our null hypothesis posits that there is no difference between bull and bear market returns while our alternative hypothesis posits that there is a positive difference. Our critical rejection region will be [1.64 to infinity]. Following a stratified sampling method, we arrive at the two population means: The Z-Test statistic formula will be the difference in means (μ1−μ2) less D0 divided by the square root of the standard error of both the bull and bear market ROIs. We arrive at a test statistic of -0.717. This value does not fall into our critical rejection region of [1.64 to infinity] and therefore fail to reject the null hypothesis. This suggests that there is no difference between the average ROI (and by extension performance) between bull and bear markets. This assertion continues to hold true at both the 99% and 99.9% confidence levels. We additionally tested if this holds true when we change the Alternative hypothesis from Ha:μ1−μ2>D0 to Ha:μ1−μ2≠D0 (which denotes that there is a significant difference between the average ROI in bull and bear markets). We find that at the 95%, 99% and 99.9% confidence levels we still fail to reject the null hypothesis. 4. Summary of Findings Surprise! Shitcoins will remain shitcoins, regardless of market’s health. In summary, we found there to be no statistical significance in the average ICO performance in either a bull or bear market. In fact, we find that 1) there tends to be far more performance losers than winners regardless of market environment 2) ICOs, on average, tend to underperform in both bull and bear markets (where the market is driven by incumbent coins and tokens), and 3) bull markets see more outliers of negative performers! We can safely say that there needs to be more studies done, and there are so many more variables at play here. But those looking to raise working capital through an ICO should not focus on trying to time the market but rather focus their efforts on other aspects such as the actual product, the white paper, marketing hype, building the community, and etc. When I assigned Garrick this task, I thought that I was going to prove to the world that investing in ICOs during a bear market was a bad idea. Not only was I proven wrong, but this study has given me new epiphanies on how to further capitalize the downtrends. Editor’s Note: If you are looking to launch an ICO, or need help with marketing one, After all, we literally study these kinds of things. let us help you. Originally published at lunardigitalassets.com on July 6, 2018.

ICO Returns Are Unaffected by Bear Markets, Research Shows

There is nothing dubious about Shadow Man. He just wishes to remain in the shadows, which is something I can respect. The air was sticky in this 200 year old Caribbean city. All the buildings were the original architecture, and I could not stop thinking about the crazy stories I had heard about this place. Years ago many of the biggest drug cartels in the world allegedly laundered billions of dollars here before stricter banking laws were adopted. I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into, but Shadow Man seemed like a cool guy with an interesting story. We randomly met in a Bitcoin chat group months previous after discussing an article I wrote, “ ” Shadow Man understood the underground Caribbean Bitcoin world from a real life perspective. He also dealt directly with India, Venezuela and other South American countries. He did not just understand it. He was pioneering it. Extortion, Police Raids and Secrecy: Inside The Venezuelan Bitcoin Mining World. We agreed to meet at a restaurant and as I sat down at the table, I realized I didn’t even know this guys name or what he looked like. All kinds of thoughts raced through my head. Five minutes later a sharply dressed young guy walks in with a well tailored suit jacket. We made eye contact and I waved him over. We then introduced ourselves, and before long, we were deep in Bitcoin conversation. After he told me more about himself and his business, I kept thinking, “Most of the world has no clue this even goes on.” Everyday we read articles about developers, venture capital deals and ICO’s, but we rarely hear about the real life stories of the people carving out their piece of the ecosystem. “Not all treasure is silver and gold mate.” Captain Jack Sparrow Who is Shadow man? When we were about to part ways, I asked if I could do an interview with him. Like most people in the Bitcoin underground, he declined at first. I told him I would keep his identity and location anonymous. This was the genesis of the name Shadow Man. There is nothing dubious about it. He just wishes to remain in the shadows, which is something I can respect. A few months after I got back to the states we re-connected and put this interview together. Some of the details of his business we left out to protect his privacy. Shadow Man without a doubt has helped bring Bitcoin to his Island and surrounding countries. He is a perfect example of a Bitcoin entrepreneur growing the ecosystem in a remote area of the world. The internet is a crazy place. I dont reccomend meeting random people in foreign places unless you know them well. What area of the world are you from? I am from an island in the Caribbean. Why do you wish to stay anonymous? I value my privacy; I do business with traders in Venezuela and that’s an automatic red flag to regulators in most countries. Why are you talking to me? There is a lot of misinformation about Bitcoin, and so if the information that I’m sharing here can be of educational value, I’m all for it. Also, I would like to debunk the ‘nocoiner’ claim that Bitcoin can’t be used as real money, by providing examples of how I use Bitcoin in my daily life. What is your technical background, education or formal training? I wouldn’t say I have a technical background, but I can say that I am more tech savvy than most normies, (thank God; good OPSEC is tough.) I attended a university in the US, was studying business, but never graduated. When did you become interested in Bitcoin and crypto? I first heard about Bitcoin in 2011, and like most people it was a friend who was showing me this nifty way to buy drugs online. I found it cool but didn’t fully get it, and so I dismissed it. It had resurfaced in mid 2013 for me, and I’ve been in love ever since. When did you buy your first Bitcoin? 2013, on mtGox. Andreas Antonpopulous is a legend. His videos will teach you what you need to know about Bitcoin. What was it about Bitcoin that pulled you in? Initially it was the price action. But then I started binging on videos on YouTube. He used to be on the Bitcoin group hangouts in the early episodes, and he had mentioned Austrian Economics. And so that led me to read literary works by Mises, Rothbard, etc. I’ve had a disdain for the state apparatus for a long time, but never quite realized how economics is at the heart of it all. Also, the cypherpunk writings at the Nakamoto Institute were very informative and extremely fun to read. Andreas Antonopolous What is your biggest Bitcoin fail? I’d say my biggest crypto fail was a recent fuck-up I had with one of my Monero wallets ( .) I believe I fell victim to a phishing redirect attack. Lost quite a big chunk of Monero, but that forced me to learn how to generate secure paper wallets. You can never be too careful in this space; only the paranoid survive. mymonero.com What is your single favorite Bitcoin moment? The lightning network being deployed on mainnet. According to many people in the space, this is a game changer that will enable things we can’t even imagine yet. Who are a few Bitcoiners who have influenced you the most? In the early days it was , and The Bitcoin Group panel. Also, one particular talk I saw on YouTube by Erik Voorhees titled “ .” I kinda lost some respect for Voorhees after his short-sighted public support for Segwit2x, but I’m still grateful for his early evangelism. Andreas MadBitcoins’ The role of Bitcoin as money Nowadays some of the Bitcoiners I look up to are, in no particular order: , , , , , the meat eater maximalist ( , , ), , , , , etc. Jimmy Song Nick Szabo Adam Back Eric Lombrozo Andreas Rochard Saifedean Goldstein Francis Pouliot Kyle Torpey Andrew DeSantis Vortex What do you see in Bitcoin that others might not living in Caribbean? The ability to help illegal immigrants send money home to their families. Especially to countries in great turmoil like Venezuela. What is the Bitcoin world like in your part of the Caribbean? Very niche. There is a regular meetup here, but nothing anywhere near mainstream adoption. How many people do you know who hold Bitcoin on your island or close to you? I got some of my family members and friends into it. Also, the few people that attend the Bitcoin meetup here. How do most people buy their Bitcoin where you live? Through online exchanges, I believe. Is there any mining happening on your island? There are rumors but nothing I can confirm. Being in an old Caribbean city talking Bitcoin with Shadow Man made me realize how small the Bitcoin world really is. There are many good people working everyday to help build the economy. What is the regulation on Bitcoin like on your island? While there has been a warning issued by central banks about scams like Onecoin and Bitconnect, there has been no official statement released mentioning Bitcoin. What do you think about countries cracking down on Bitcoin? These crackdowns are very short-sighted and are based in irrational fear. The innovation and economic growth will only move elsewhere, where regulation is more conducive to technological progress. We saw a clear example of this of how btc businesses in NY reacted to the Bitlicense. In the book, the authors predict countries that want economic growth will start treating citizens more like customers rather than cattle, so as to attract entrepreneurs. The book was written in 1999 and is extremely prescient, they even predict the rise of Bitcoin, or as they call it ‘cybercash.’ I can’t recommend it enough. ‘The Sovereign Individual,’ Explain a little bit about how your business started? I came to a realization a couple of years ago that could effectively be used to facilitate remittances. LocalBitcoins How has it grown over the last few years? Before, I used to deal with Venezuelan immigrants who wanted to send money home. They would give me cash and I would have the money sent to their local Venezuelan bank account using localbitcoins. I would rather have my customers receive USD, but unfortunately the only way to get money to their bank accounts would be in the local hyperinflationary currency, the Venezuelan Bolívar. I would do trades as small as the equivalent of $20 usd. Now I deal with retail store owners in town, who have access to a Venezuelan bank account, so they buy larger quantities of bolívares from me, and then in turn sell those bolívares to the Venezuelan immigrants who live on my island. This might all sound confusing but it’s basically arbitrage trading through the informal remittance market. What type of services do you currently offer? I’m actually doing less of that and getting more into enterprise level crypto-mining. This is a story I published with HackerNoon in January 2018. Have you heard of people getting arrested? Not here on my island, no. But I hear about miners getting busted in Venezuela sometimes. Do you do most of your business on Localbitcoins.com or p2p? I use LocalBitcoins a lot, but I also deal with certain traders directly, so p2p as well. These are traders that I initially started doing business with on localbitcoins, but then developed a comfortable level of trust to the point where the valuable escrow feature of localbitcoins was no longer needed. Explain what LocalBitcoins is and how it works? is an online, peer-to-peer Bitcoin exchange, that allows you to buy and sell Bitcoin with individuals all over the world. The killer feature is the escrow service provided by the platform. Localbitcoins.com What are some of the positives and negatives about using LocalBitcoins versus straight p2p? Pros: 1. Awesome escrow feature 2. Cool way to connect with traders all over the world. 3. Good track record in terms of security. Cons: 1. LocalBitcoins takes a cut off of every trade, 1% I believe. 2. Scammers. Some scammers build up their reputation by doing fair trades with good customer feedback and then use their reputation as leverage to try to convince noobs to trade outside of . localBitcoins.com What tips do you have for people who are interested in using LocalBitcoins. Always read extended feedback of a user before initiating a trade. I have never used LocalBitcoins personally, but I have many friends who have. What do you think about the new change with LocalBitcoins requireming AML/KYC? The change has not really affected my usage. These kind of changes are however likely to push me and many other traders to look to decentralized alternatives such as Bisq. Will you continue to use LocalBitcoins ? For the foreseeable future, yes. What other sites are good options to use besides LocalBitcoins.com for better privacy? LocalBitcoins is the only one I can think of. There are others like Paxful, but I’ve never used them. What are a few easy red flags to spot a scammer on these sites? Next to a LocalBitcoins username, you can see number of trades as well as a percentage. The percentage refers to feedback score. The obvious red flag is if this percentage score is not at 100%. That’s not to say those with 100% score are to be blindly trusted. The user score system on lbc is a bit flawed imo and can be better. The main point here is dont fall for tricks by traders to lure you into doing business outside of the LBC platform and ALWAYS CHECK EXTENDED FEEDBACK BEFORE DECIDING TO TRADE WITH ANYONE! What country do you do the most arbitrage with? Venezuela and India What is it like dealing with the Bolivar and Venezuelan Banks. It feels fucked up dealing with a currency that gets more and more worthless by the hour, literally. It’s one of the reasons I don’t trade much with Venezuela anymore. Getting scammed can happen to anyone. You must pay attention at all times. Never believe you are immune. Tell us a horror story you have encountered? I got scammed in the early days by a Venezuelan trader. We did a few trades together on localbitcoins and then he convinced me to do a trade outside of localbitcoins. As soon as I sent him the btc, he disappeared. The only thing I could do was leave negative feedback on his localbitcoins profile. What’s it like dealing with India versus Venezuela? It’s pretty much the same. The only main difference is that the Venezuelan currency is hyperinflationary, which means the value is in constant freefall. The Indian Rupee is relatively more stable. How do you feel about decentralized exchanges like hodlhodl and bisque? I am very excited about the development of these kinds of exchanges. I think the model is already workable, there just needs to be more liquidity. Something that spurs a network effect, which is inevitable imo. What security tips do you suggest for storing your crypto? Get a Trezor. What are your thoughts on alt-coins? I hold some to speculate, but my bag is mainly BTC. This is a basic break down of OPSEC. Be proactive about implementing and optimizing your OPSEC strategy. Where do you see crypto going in 5–10–20 years? BTC TO THE MOON You attended the event in Acapulco this year. What was your biggest take away from there? It was a shit coin fest, sponsored by the biggest shit coiner of them all, Roger Ver. A lot of noobs who attended are falling for this ‘Satoshi’s Vision’ narrative, sadly. What Bitcoin news sites and podcasts do you get your information from? This a great read for any serious Bitcoiner! Mainly Twitter. I like , , , and . The Bitcoin Group Vortex’s The Bitcoin News Show Noded Podcast Block Digest Best tips you can give anyone new to the Bitcoin and alt-currency world? Get good OPSEC. Any last thoughts or words of wisdom? HODL BTC! And read Saifedean Ammous’ THE BITCOIN STANDARD. Special thanks to Shadow Man for doing this interview. We are forever connected by Bitcoin. Find me on twitter @piratebeachbum or Hackernoon/@piratebeachbum @ftw_tour ftwtour.com

The Underground Caribbean Bitcoin World: Interview With Shadow Man

⚡️View the hottest state management libs for React Why? This is to serve as a Rosetta Stone of state management systems. A basic packing list app was built in: setState React 16.x Context Redux — by Dan Abramov MobX — by Michel Weststrate unstated — by Jamie Kyle MobX-State-Tree — by Michel Weststrate again Apollo GraphQL with Amazon AppSync setState + react-automata — by Michele Bertoli Freactal — by Dale while at Formidable ReduxX — by Mikey Stecky-Efantis pure-store — by Arthur Gunn AND MANY MORE! Surely you’re familiar with one or more of the aforementioned systems, and now you can leverage that knowledge to better understand many others. It’s your chance to see what all the buzz is about, and honestly, how similar all these state systems really are. To portray these systems in a terse and understandable form, the chosen app is a simple packing list app with only the ability to and . add clear Simple as it gets app (Native and Web) To illustrate state jumping the wire, the ADD/CLEAR is one component, and the LIST is a secondary component in all examples. Even the two main components (adding/listing) have been abstracted to an imported library, leaving only fundamental code in order to emphasize state choice(s). The code is meant to be minimalistic. Welcome to the React State Museum! The code for each of these systems can be found in React and React Native. https://github.com/GantMan/ReactStateMuseum Use the above repo to personally dive into each of those systems and check them out! 🔥 Also: Watch the talk from Connect.Tech here: _"Use redux, don't use redux. Use mobx, but don't use mobx. Hell just use setState! Don't worry, the new Context will…_www.recallact.com React State Museum | recallact.com Personal Notes on Each Solution: If you want code, check the GitHub, if you want opinions, continue into this very long description below. Here I jump into the differences between each item in the museum, and that which makes it unique. If you’ve got some strong opinions, or experiences, please share them in the comments. I’m also interested in giving this report as a fun-filled conference talk. setState Here’s the most basic structure of state management, it depends only on the fundamental understanding of components and their encapsulation. In many ways, this is a great example for beginners in React. Explicitly raising state to a root component that all components are children of identifies the props vs. state relationship. As an application grows, explicit connections down into components would be more and more complex and fragile, which is why this is not commonly used. The Code: | React React Native React Context https://reactjs.org/docs/context.html There’s been a lot of buzz about the updates to Context. In fact, the final form of Context in 16.x feels a bit like a state management system itself. For simplicity, the context allows for and a . All children of a provider will have access to the values applied there. All non-children will see the context defaults. The following graph explains such lineage. provider consumer Only children inherit On a second, and very opinionated note, I’m not a fan of the consumption syntax structure. Clearly, it’s a function that is the child of Consumer, but it feels like it violates JSX while mega-overloading all use cases of braces. A pedantic issue, but the readability of code should always factor into API, and on this front, Context starts to feel a bit dirty. The Code: | React React Native Redux https://github.com/reactjs/react-redux I’ll dare say at the time of this writing Redux is the most popular state management tool, and therefore the most attacked. Writing a solution in Redux took many files, and almost double the lines of code. But to Redux’s defense, it’s simple and flexible. If you’re unfamiliar with Redux, it’s a functional approach to state management that provides time-travel and clean state management in a form like a reducer function. Dan Abramov’s video explaining redux has been watched times. many In short, it’s like having someone shout commands in your app (Actions) which are projected via Action Creators. Data managers in your app (Reducers) hear those shouts, and can optionally act on them. I love my pirate ship analogy, so shouting “MAN_OVERBOARD” can tell your crew counter to subtract the staff by one, the accountant to re-split the treasure, and the guy swabbing the deck can just ignore it because he doesn’t care. I like this analogy, because shouting is a powerful way to manage all corners of your app, and in larger applications, noisy. Combine this with no way to handle side-effects and the need to glue on an immutable structure to make it all work, Redux is the bill-by-hour developer’s friend. The Code: | React React Native MobX https://github.com/mobxjs/mobx-react MobX is one of the EASIEST state managers to get started with. Open the readme, and follow along and you’ll have things running in no time. It feels like mutable JS, and it really kind of is. The only part that might throw you for a loop is the decorators like on classes. Though odd, they kind of clean up the code a bit. @observer @observer is like an automatic `mapStateToProps` + `reselect` if you’re used redux things — Steve Kellock Be sure to checkout Nader’s blog post highlighting some more advanced topics on switching to MobX. _In late 2017 I worked on a React Native project with a team that had used MobX as their state management library. I had…_medium.com Ditching setState for MobX - Nader Dabit - Medium In summation, MobX was one of the smallest and simplest tools to add! The Code: | React React Native Unstated https://github.com/jamiebuilds/unstated Unstated was as easy as MobX. Much like MobX felt like mutable JavaScript, Unstated felt like adding more React code. I actually feel that Unstated feels more like React than Context did. It’s simple, you create a container, and inside that container, you manage state. Simple known functions like exist inside the state container. It’s not just an apt name; it’s an apt React based manager. setState I’m not sure how well it scales or handles middleware etc. but if you’re a beginner to state management MobX and Unstated are the simplest tools to get up and running! The Code: | React React Native MobX-State-Tree https://github.com/mobxjs/mobx-state-tree Yes, this is VERY different from vanilla MobX. It’s a common misconception. Even my co-workers try to shorten the title down to “MobX,” and I’m always pushing MST as an alternative instead. With that being said, it’s important to note MobX-State-Tree sports all the great features of Redux + reselect + Side-effect management and more all in one opinionated bundle with less code. In this small example, the only thing that’s obvious is the terse syntax. The lines of code are barely bigger than our original MobX example. Both share that succinct decorator syntax. Though it takes a bit of time to really get all the benefits out of MobX-State-Tree. The most important note is that if you came from ActiveRecord or some other kind of ORM, MobX-State-Tree feels like a clean data model with normalized relations. This is a great state management tool for an application that will scale. The Code: | React React Native Apollo GraphQL and Amazon AppSync https://github.com/apollographql/react-apollo https://aws.amazon.com/appsync/ If you haven’t jumped on the GraphQL train, you’re missing out. Apollo GraphQL + AppSync is a great way to manage your state, AND handle offline, AND handle fetching API, AND handle setting up a GraphQL server. It’s a serious solution. Many have projected GraphQL to effectively “solve” the state debate. In a lot of ways that’s easy, and in a lot of ways, that’s hard. Not everyone is ready to use a GraphQL server, but if you are, then AppSync is an easy way to handle all your data in your DynamoDB. It takes more time/energy to get this up and running, but with clear benefits. In my example, I don’t really use all the bells and whistles. You can see the delay as the data awaits from the server, and I’m not using subscriptions to get updates. This example could get better. But it’s as simple as wrapping the config with the components. Tadaaaaa! The rest is history. Please be careful what you put in the packing list in this example, as it’s shared. Special note: The Code: | React React Native setState + react-automata https://github.com/MicheleBertoli/react-automata This is a strange one in the group. In many ways, you’re wondering how setState is involved, and the answer is simple. The idea of breaking state down into a state-machine is very different from most state management systems. By creating an machine config, you handle how state gets passed, called, and identified. Therefore, you must identify ALL states your app can be in, and ALL ways it can move from one state to another. Much like dispatching an action in Redux, you have to to another state on a given event. xstate transition It’s not a full state management system; it’s merely a state-machine for your state management. Here’s the chart created by our statechart Exciting benefits come from using statecharts. Firstly, you can be protected from transitions you don’t want. For instance, you can’t transition to “loaded” state without first typing text. This stops empty adds to our packing list. Secondly, all transitions of state can be automatically generated and tested. With one simple command, multiple snapshots of state are generated. : On React Native I had to to satisfy some unused import in a dependency. This was a sneaky gotcha for native only CAVEAT yarn add path The Code: | React React Native Freactal https://github.com/FormidableLabs/freactal/ Of course, we’ll feature the awesome work of Formidable Labs. Freactal is a very advanced example and states it can replace , , , , , and more. [redux](https://redux.js.org/) [MobX](https://mobx.js.org/) [reselect](https://github.com/reactjs/reselect) [redux-loop](https://github.com/redux-loop/redux-loop) [redux-thunk](https://github.com/gaearon/redux-thunk) [redux-saga](https://github.com/redux-saga/redux-saga) Though this was probably the most difficult one for me to setup, I still see it has great value. More examples would have helped. Special thanks to who agreed to answer any questions I had while reading through the docs. Ken Wheeler The final code is succinct and straightforward. It feels a bit like the Context syntax in the end. I especially like the use of name-spacing separately from , and though there’s not much stopping you from taking this convention to other libs. effects state computer The Code: | React React Native ReduxX https://github.com/msteckyefantis/reduxx ReduxX, while probably having a bit of trouble in SEO, is still a pretty cool name. “Why is it you can add X to something to make it cool?” — Gant X ReduxX reads pretty well as in some ways it reminds me a bit of the charisma from Unstated, as we’re using verbiage to set and mutate state. One aspect that might seem alien, is the state is retrieved with as a function. This feels a bit like keychain access, and I wonder if there could be some certs/crypto mixed in easily? Food for thought. I see there’s which will swap keys out for GUIDs. Security-wise this library might have some interesting advantages. react-styled getState obscureStateKeys: true As for how to use it, Set and Get via keys. That’s it! If you’re not worried about middleware, and you’re familiar with keychain globals, you already know ReduxX. Special thanks to the author Mikey Stecky-Efantis for providing this example! pure-store https://github.com/gunn/pure-store 100% test coverage, MIT licensed, TypeScript backed mini-library for state management. This library feels the closest to “Just use globals”. As a matter of fact, if you identify that takes the signature of then you’re looking at a global state in a singleton. update setState Special thanks to Arthur Gunn for contributing this example! The Missing State Example? I’m sure there are other state managers out there which are being sorely under-represented here, and if you know them, please send a PR to the public repo. I’ll happily accept contributions so that we can all benefit. I’ll even update this blog post as new systems are added. So please, file tickets, and more importantly contribute! The museum thanks you 😆 Since this writing, many people have contributed!!! I’m especially thankful and happy that in some cases, people used this library to learn that their state system did not work with React Native, and the fixed it upstream!!! UPDATE: To get a full listing of state systems visit the repo . In Summation: You can get pretty far with setState and Context! Why bring in a dependency at all? If you’re not sure your app will need it, try to ship without an external lib. You might be able combine Context with something simple like react-automata to round out a clean and testable result! Do you want no dependencies? **Do you want simple?**unstated, reduxX, and pure-state are easy and simple. They have slight opinion differences, and small differentiating benefits for each. MobX is also easy, but shows up with some decorator syntax you have to accept. If you do, then the code stays readable and optimized, with a TON of docs/stackoverflow help. VERY **Do you want scalable?**If you’re sure your app is going to need all the bells and whistles, it’s time to break out the big guns. This is where Redux shines. You’re forever a mechanic when you implement Redux, so you know you can adapt. MobX-State-Tree shows up with all the powers of MobX + opinions, state, optimizations, and more. It’s not something you can comprehend in a single sitting, but each time you learn more about it, you’re empowering your application. There’s no doubt that GraphQL is catching fire in the technical space. Now if you’re using it with AppSync for networking, or if you’re simply using to manage your local data, you surrender some fine-grained control, but gain power in return. Be sure to keep an eye on these libraries as they evolve. It’s likely that many of the state-systems above will have to adapt to accommodate GraphQL in the near future. Do you want the future? apollo-link-state is Chief Technology Strategist at , published author, adjunct professor, worldwide public speaker, and mad scientist in training. Please clap/follow/tweet or just say hi to him . Gant Laborde Infinite Red at a conference Credits Header graphic thanks to: https://unsplash.com/photos/uqMBLm8bAdA Special thanks to who has since this blog post was originally released! Juan David Castro contributed extensively Have a minute? Check out a few more: _The Pitfalls of Remote Work + Proposed Solutions_shift.infinite.red 5 Things that Suck about Remote Work _Add Solidarity to your project for multi-machine peace of mind_shift.infinite.red Solidarity — The CLI for Developer Sanity

⚛ The React State Museum

In-depth analysis of the current state of the Block Producer model in EOS The battle is on for the right to be one of the 21 block producers (BPs) as part of the EOS main network (mainnet) launch on “June 3, 2018, 7:00 AM GMT+9”. As a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS) blockchain, EOS’ block confirmations will be handled by these 21 block producers, as voted by their constituents, instead of using the energy-consuming Proof of Work (POW) consensus block confirmations as with Bitcoin. As it now stands, different BPs have their strengths — for example, EOS New York has experience and leadership on the governance front, while the Chinese EOS groups appear to have a massive following and strong backing of many EOS token holders. Since every EOS token held will have 30 votes each (each token cannot vote for the same node twice), block producers will have to ensure that they win enough votes to qualify on the top 21 list, or be benched on the standby list. Hence, there is a very competitive bid for each block producer to put forward their proposals and contributions to the community as we hurtle along towards the mainnet launch date. In this piece, we explore EOS, the current block producers, the requirements of being a block producer, and the EOS community. What is EOS? EOS was founded by Dan Larimer (who is also the founder of Steemit and Bitshares, some of the earlier products in the space showcasing the possibilities of decentralized applications and DPOS). Largely due to legal reasons, so as not to be construed as a security, the EOS.IO software is produced by a separate entity called block.one, led by Dan Larimer. EOS.IO is meant to be a free and open source software for use by EOS developers. As part of its software suite, developers can create EOS smart contracts and draw up governance systems within decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO), and use it as the OS for decentralized applications (dApps). Dan Larimer — founder of EOS The philosophy behind EOS is to create a blockchain platform that fulfills the following (as explained in greater detail in the technical ): whitepaper Support millions of users Free transactions (usage) Easy upgrades and bug recovery Low latency Sequential performance Parallel performance The design of EOS, incorporating these properties, stem from the fact that current blockchains tend to have scalability issues, making them hard to deploy for applications requiring quick responses and confirmations at high volume. For example, with a block confirmation approximately once every ~10 minutes for Bitcoin, or ~13–14 seconds for Ethereum, it is difficult for consumer-facing applications or payment systems to really provide snappy feedback when a user is waiting in line or online for their transactions to confirm. There are a total of 1B available EOS tokens, and the initial funding for the development of the EOS ecosystem is done through a token sale over the course of one year. The core team shared that the the EOS Token distribution takes place over 341 days to provide ample time for the community to familiarize themselves with the project, as well as participate in the distribution. EOS distributed and ETH collected as part of the token sale as of April 4th, 2018 As of April 4th, 2018, 776,000,000 EOS tokens have been distributed via the token sale. Total amount of ETH collected as part of the token sale has been 4,768,749 ETH. According to on March 29th, 2018, EOS is the #6 ranked token in market cap at $4,631,625,931. Coinmarketcap EOS on CoinMarketCap as of March 29, 2018 EOS voting system The current version of the EOS voting system works such that every 180-ish seconds, all votes are counted per token holder, and the top 21 block producers are elected for that round. There are currently 1B EOS tokens — assuming each EOS token holder stakes all tokens for voting, there will be about 30B votes received by all candidate block producers. While there’s much discussion about the number of votes required to be a sustaining BP, I will provide analysis from a few angles. This is of course a hypothesis and serves as a guide for you to build upon: Comparing to LISK, also a DPOS blockchain, that already has a live voting process. Using some basic assumptions based on the context around EOS. It’s anyone’s guess what the final outcome will be, but we can draw some hypotheses based on the current situation. Note that the economic structure will also change as more details are released in the coming weeks. LISK comparison We can compare the EOS DPOS structure and plans to Lisk, another project utilizing DPOS structure. Lisk has a system of 101 “delegates” and voters have 101 votes each with no double voting. Since there are over 1500 possible delegates to vote to, the top 101 represents 6–7% of the total possible candidates. According to Coinmarketcap, the circulating supply of LISK tokens is: 103,481,304. The maximum amount of votes a single delegate can receive is also: 103,481,304. At the moment, the top delegate is “thepool”: . This delegate has received 42,464,294 votes from 10,988 voters, with an approval percentage of 35.49%. The effective average votes per voter for this delegate is 3864. https://explorer.lisk.io/delegate/10839494368003872009L The 101th delegate is “alepop”: . This delegate has received 29,661,297 votes from 4593 voters, with an approval percentage of 24.79%. The effective average votes per voter for this delegate is 6458. https://explorer.lisk.io/delegate/9010579446607279905L It is interesting to note that 33 of the 101 Lisk delegates are part of the GDT Pool: , which keeps a transparent list of members and has continuously made good contributions to the Lisk community, legitimizing their consolidation of delegates. https://pool.liskgdt.net/members Thus if we take this information from Lisk at face value to arrive at numbers for the EOS Block Producer candidate voting, with 1B EOS tokens, each block producer can theoretically receive 1B votes at the maximum. Assuming that each voter holds an average of 5000 votes, there will be around 70,000 voters for the 1st placed BP and 50,000 voters rooting for the 21st placed. The 1st placed BP should receive around 350M votes and the 21st placed EOS BP will receive around 250M votes. Assumption-based calculations Another way to calculate potential outcomes for the EOS voting procedure is to take some common sense approaches in understanding different scenarios, considering different parameters based on economic incentives. In my simple model to calculate possible vote outcomes, I’ve used a calculation based on 2 points: Participation: How many tokens participate in the voting process Vote difference between the ranks: How much vote differential does one BP get from the one before it In this case, I mocked up multiple scenarios showing how each BP’s votes might turn out based on these twin factors of participation and vote difference. Realistically, vote participation may not be that high, hence I capped the participation rate at 70% in these scenarios; it could be a lot lower, assuming only block producers vote amongst themselves (which means there could be a potential of vote-trading, which is against the constitution). Another peril I have not shown in these models is the fact that not all 30 votes need to be deployed for each token; for example, BPs can choose to vote only for themselves and their allies. Given enough holding volume, collusion can happen, with the top 21 belonging in the same cartel and voting for each other every round. As 21 is not a large number, we cannot rule out the possibility of such collusion. If you are interested to play with the numbers yourself, please make a copy of the sheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gUEFkDN9LfZjmJhKuJP16rhLZdu1eaIhtu1eQCBSmy0/edit?usp=sharing (If you do model out the effect of potential collusion, do share it with me and I can feature your model in this post.) The role of block producers Block producers are an integral part of the EOS.IO network. Essentially, they are decentralized entities that operate and govern the EOS blockchain on behalf of the EOS stakeholders. They provide services to the blockchain in the form of hardware for block confirmations, and growing the value of EOS through community education. Block producers will be incentivized to continue being good BPs for their constituent EOS stakeholders, as they will receive a certain percentage inflation in EOS tokens per year as their reward. That is to say, they have to stay in the BP spot so they can receive more rewards; and they are aligned in contributing to having more projects and backers of EOS so that the value of the tokens they receive will grow over time. The exact amount of BP rewards is now to be capped at 1%; at this level, BPs will need to be highly efficient in resource allocation for the economics to make sense in operating as a BP. Some of the requirements of a good, high-performing BP are: likely Technical: Block creation/confirmation File hosting Standing by back-up servers Initializing and designating seed nodes Governance: Following the constitution Account freezing, action on misbehaving contracts Enforcing take-down notices of files Staying on top of hard and soft forks, fees (account creation), optimizing parameters (blocksize, rate-limited capacity) Leadership: Acting like a CEO in a traditional company, basically keeping everything internal under control Communicating with other block producers Campaigning to get elected as a BP Possible extra services: Account recovery Account creation Oracles Price feeds Dispute resolution service EOSphere created a good summary of the role of an EOS block producer: https://youtu.be/YLt5uexD9gg The EOSGo forum has decided that, as a good community member, they will not be participating in the election of Block producer candidacy to avoid any potential conflicts of interest. They have dedicated resources to evaluating different BPs based on 6 main criteria: Public Presence ID on Steemit Tech plans Scaling Community Telegram + testnet The total score is then published in the below infographic on a rolling basis weekly: EOSGo BP report for week ending March 28, 2018 Technical requirements for being a block producer Since BPs are critical to the health and stability of the blockchain, the technical requirements are relatively demanding as well. The exact needs on the technical requirements front is still in the works and not decided, all the information that BPs and others in the community are talking about are still speculation and guess-estimates. To support the blockchain as a BP, enterprise-level set ups are necessary. For example, a BP such as HelloEOS is planning on the following specifications: 16 cores, 256GB RAM, 1TB SSD HD. In this case, to estimate the cost of provisioning a similar set up, we observe the prices for a comparable Microsoft Azure service: a D15 v2 to run the node, the 20 cores, 140GB RAM and 1TB temporary storage — $3.059/hour before taxes. A single set up of the following specs will cost $26,797 a year. (Note that even a D15 v2 instance doesn’t fulfill the requirement of a 256GB RAM as proposed by HelloEOS.) Estimates from Microsoft Azure pricing for cloud services The cost of maintaining such a setup is definitely low, meaning that only those with the prerequisite monetary and technical resources can put in a competitive bid to be a BP in the first place. This could signal some form of self-selection where only wealthy token holders and consortiums can be a BP to begin with, and stand to benefit most from the BP rewards in the long run. not Additionally, we also see the potential risk of many BPs using cloud providers such as AWS and Azure, in effect centralizing the EOS infrastructure on the current oligopolistic cloud provider market, defeating the purpose of decentralization in the first place. Top EOS token holders Speaking of centralization, we can also analyze the current token holders of EOS. Since EOS is a ERC-20 token today, all EOS-holding wallets can be viewed on Etherscan — https://etherscan.io/token/EOS There are about 300,000+ unique addresses with EOS, with 70%+ of tokens held by the top 100 accounts. Etherscan token holders chart for EOS EOS SoCal presented another cool infographic view: Wallets supporting EOS Most of the major cryptocurrency wallets and exchanges that support ERC-20 tokens have announced plans to support EOS mainnet token swap. After the conclusion of the EOS token sale, the EOS tokens will transition from ERC20 EOS into Mainnet EOS. Thus : is a secure mobile wallet for over 20+ cryptocurrencies. Cobo imToken Scatter enables signing EOS transactions on web applications (like Metamask): http://scatter-eos.com Exchanges like Binance (see “Where to trade EOS” below) Where to trade EOS Since EOS is currently a ERC-20 token before the mainnet token swap, let’s take a look at the avenues for getting EOS with your ETH tokens (alphabetical order): Bibox Binance Bitfinex Gate.io HitBTC Huobi IDEX Kraken Kucoin Liqui OKEx YoBit dApps planned to be released on EOS _Full index of EOS Projects:_ https://eosindex.io/posts https://eosprojects.org/ Some highlighted projects: (no particular order, more to come in the next few months) EasyEos — A smart,easy eos wallet. Evolution — New decentralized Blockchain built using EOS open source.EOSBook — book exchange. antonym.life — antonym.life — always prepared — the LinkedIn for your personal life. WEOS Social Dapp — WEOS: Improving the way we connect with each other and the market at-large. Project Graceland — National governance where the rules of administration are coded into smart contracts. RedAppl — A dating app built on EOS bringing an innovative evolving profile algorithm. EOSFinex — High performance decentralized exchange combining EOS.IO software with Bitfinex experience. Everipedia — Crowdsourced wiki platform, online encyclopedia. Ono — decentralized social network. Scatter — decentralized application bridge for the EOS blockchain. Billionaire token — Decentralized games on the blockchain. Currently on Ethereum. Who’s who in EOS (based on contribution to Github and community sharing as of publishing time) As with other blockchain projects, the community is imperative to its long-term success. For EOS, there is a burgeoning enthusiast and developer community, many of whom are already running tests on EOSD. For reference, here are some of the most active members you see around the EOS community: Block.one core team: Dan Larimer, CTOThomas Cox, VP ProductBrendan Blumerm, CEO Top EOS.IO Github commits: Kevin HeifnerBrian JohnsonWanderingbortNathan HourtPhil MesnierMatias RomeoMatt WitherspoonJgiszczakAndrianto LieAnton PerkovBucky KittingerBill Hamilton News To keep up with what’s what in EOS, there are also plenty of news resources. Two of these are the main congregating ground for many community members: EOSGO is a great source of information: Subreddit for EOS: https://forums.eosgo.io/ https://www.reddit.com/r/eos/ EOS communities Telegram groups are often the best places to start looking at for community events and clusters. Here’s a list collated by EOS New York:EOS General Chat (English): https://t.me/EOSproject Meetup Channels: EOS New York: eosnewyorkchatEOS London: EOS Nairobi: EOS Hong Kong: EOS Nation: EOS SEA: https://t.me/ https://t.me/EOSLondon https://t.me/eosnairobi https://t.me/EOSHongKong https://t.me/EOSNation https://t.me/EOSSEA EOS Developers: EOS Index (List of current EOS projects): EOS Community Test Network: EOS Developers: EOS Game Developers: https://t.me/eosindex https://t.me/CommunityTestnet https://t.me/joinchat/EgOVjkPktgfUS3kt14FStw https://t.me/EosGameDevelopers EOS Price and Trading: EOS Price Discussion: https://t.me/EOSPrice EOS Discussion Channels: EOS Block Producers: EOS Governance: EOS DAC Creators: EOS Opportunities: EOS Design: EOS Marketing: https://t.me/EOSPros https://t.me/EOSGov https://t.me/EOSDAC https://t.me/eos_opportunities https://t.me/EOSdesign https://t.me/EOSmarketing EOS News: EOS Go Announcements: EOS Airdrops: Dan Larimer Bot: EOS Airdrops #2: https://t.me/eosgo_announcements https://t.me/EOS_Airdrop https://t.me/daneos https://t.me/airdropsforeos dApps: Chintai EOS: chintaiEOSEveripedia: everipedia Scatter https://t.me/ https://t.me/ https://t.me/ Korean: KOREOS: EOS Korea: https://t.me/koreosio https://t.me/EOSIOKorea Chinese: EOS China: https://t.me/EOSCN Conclusion As with any new community and project, this level of turbulence, excitement and hype is expected. My personal belief is that as the community evolves and makes more concrete decisions, we will see more equitability among block producers, developers, investors, users and companies alike. Let the “Romance of the 21 EOS kingdoms” continue to bring us laughter and joy. With the differences between the different BP candidates, innovation, governance and responsible growth of the EOS ecosystem will thrive. If you do like what you’ve read here, do pay close attention to us at & the EOS South East Asia community at . We look forward to serving the community together. Cobo wallet EOSSEA

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