Skynest

skynest

When James Cameron first teased Terminator 2 back in the day, it was through a 90-second teaser that showed an automated robot factory pumping out endless rows of robots, ending with a shot of Arnold as the build process completed. Pure pulp fiction. Or was it? Fast forward to 2024, and we are now entering the era of the hyperfactory, where the main body of cars is autonomously assembled every 76 seconds. No, that’s not a mistype because Xaoimi, the smartphone OEM, has entered the electric vehicle arena with the SU7 and with it, a factory setup that is 91% automated with 400 robots armed with HD cameras and can operate in the dark. It reminds me of the time I spent on stage at the Big Data Expo in China with the chairman of Foxconn, and we debated the merits of running a smartphone factory with the lights off — because who needs lights when it’s just the robots running the show? The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.
— Warren Bennis Watching the keynote reveal is an eye-opening vision of the future of manufacturing but not in the way you think. “We have 269 welding machines to achieve 100% automated production and have the 36 robots to achieve 0.5 millimeters of assembly precision” “…industry leading seven axis coating robots with 70,000 RPM, it can make the paint coverage extremely fine balanced. This produces a natural flat and smooth finish..” “AMR robots that can replace forklifts/internal transport around the factory…” The best part is that the cars can then drive themselves off the factory line with the autopilot software that the company has introduced. In all, it’s a fascinating look at the future of car manufacturing. But there’s something else to consider. We are looking at the precursor of mass-produced, highly automated robot and drone production, something that I can’t help but compare to that dystopian movie. Because, let’s face it, everything is starting to point towards it. We have major AI players all rushing to give their hyperbolic algorithms some form of physical embodiment to contextually understand the world around them in a new dimension. The idea that military, DARPA, or even startup funding won’t find its way to a hyperfactory of this kind is ludicrous because they’ll be eyeing this up as a way to mass-produce killer drones and robotic tech in the blink of an eye if it means flooding the market with robotic slaves. One of the best (read: accurate) dystopian movies of the future to this day is Elysium by Neill Blomkamp, but even then, his vision of a robotic factory is forcing human labor to manufacture the military machines that take the piss on a daily basis. It just won’t be like that. It’s time to pay close attention to other industries for clues as to how stuff like Terminator or The Matrix could feasibly come true — our hubris in automating the human out of every job role and process will ultimately lead us to a path where automation can be easily retooled and reprogrammed to manufacture something else. And it won’t be a Roomba. When James Cameron first teased Terminator 2 back in the day, it was through a 90-second teaser that showed an automated robot factory pumping out endless rows of robots, ending with a shot of Arnold as the build process completed. Pure pulp fiction. Or was it? Fast forward to 2024, and we are now entering the era of the hyperfactory, where the main body of cars is autonomously assembled every 76 seconds. Fast forward to 2024, and we are now entering the era of the hyperfactory , where the main body of cars is autonomously assembled every 76 seconds. hyperfactory No, that’s not a mistype because Xaoimi, the smartphone OEM, has entered the electric vehicle arena with the SU7 and with it, a factory setup that is 91% automated with 400 robots armed with HD cameras and can operate in the dark. It reminds me of the time I spent on stage at the Big Data Expo in China with the chairman of Foxconn, and we debated the merits of running a smartphone factory with the lights off — because who needs lights when it’s just the robots running the show? It reminds me of the time I spent on stage at the Big Data Expo in China with the chairman of Foxconn, The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. — Warren Bennis The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. — Warren Bennis — Warren Bennis Watching the keynote reveal is an eye-opening vision of the future of manufacturing but not in the way you think. keynote reveal keynote reveal “We have 269 welding machines to achieve 100% automated production and have the 36 robots to achieve 0.5 millimeters of assembly precision” “…industry leading seven axis coating robots with 70,000 RPM, it can make the paint coverage extremely fine balanced. This produces a natural flat and smooth finish..” “AMR robots that can replace forklifts/internal transport around the factory…” The best part is that the cars can then drive themselves off the factory line with the autopilot software that the company has introduced. In all, it’s a fascinating look at the future of car manufacturing. But there’s something else to consider. We are looking at the precursor of mass-produced, highly automated robot and drone production, something that I can’t help but compare to that dystopian movie. We are looking at the precursor of mass-produced, highly automated robot and drone production, something that I can’t help but compare to that dystopian movie. that dystopian movie. Because, let’s face it, everything is starting to point towards it. We have major AI players all rushing to give their hyperbolic algorithms some form of physical embodiment to contextually understand the world around them in a new dimension. The idea that military, DARPA, or even startup funding won’t find its way to a hyperfactory of this kind is ludicrous because they’ll be eyeing this up as a way to mass-produce killer drones and robotic tech in the blink of an eye if it means flooding the market with robotic slaves. The idea that military, DARPA, or even startup funding won’t find its way to a hyperfactory of this kind is ludicrous because they’ll be eyeing this up as a way to mass-produce killer drones and robotic tech in the blink of an eye if it means flooding the market with robotic slaves. One of the best ( read: accurate ) dystopian movies of the future to this day is Elysium by Neill Blomkamp, but even then, his vision of a robotic factory is forcing human labor to manufacture the military machines that take the piss on a daily basis. It just won’t be like that. read: accurate It’s time to pay close attention to other industries for clues as to how stuff like Terminator or The Matrix could feasibly come true — our hubris in automating the human out of every job role and process will ultimately lead us to a path where automation can be easily retooled and reprogrammed to manufacture something else. And it won’t be a Roomba.

Skynet Is Not the One You Should Be Fearing - Fear Your Favourite Car Manufacturer Instead

If you've been anywhere on the interwebs in the last month, you have likely heard about ChatGPT. OpenAI announced the next generation of their natural language processing AI model, called ChatGPT–that you can chat with about basically any topic under the sun. People have been updating their avatars with AI generated avatars, based on ChatGPT-created prompts, and posting endless screenshots of their disbelief at the quality and breadth of ChatGPT's knowledge. Here are just a few examples of what ChatGPT is capable of: One area that really has the tech industry taken by storm is ChatGPT's capability of writing code. Some have even claimed that it will replace Google and Stack Overflow. We found this intriguing and wanted to see how it holds up with infrastructure configuration. So we took ChatGPT on a test drive. ‍ One of the greatest values that folks are excited about with this next-generation AI is really about how it handles repetitive and mundane tasks engineers hate to have to deal with. One such area is IaC templates - so our first attempt was to see how ChatGPT would deliver on creating an IaC template and modules. ‍ Let's take a look. ‍ PROMPT #1: Create a Terraform template for a highly available EKS cluster And the results are: provider "aws" {
region = "us-east-1"
}

Create an EKS cluster

resource "aws_eks_cluster" "eks_cluster" {
name     = "my-eks-cluster"
role_arn = aws_iam_role.eks_cluster_role.arn
}

Create an IAM role for the EKS cluster

Attach the AmazonEKSClusterPolicy policy to the EKS cluster role

resource "aws_iam_role_policy_attachment" "eks_cluster_policy_attachment" {
role       = aws_iam_role.eks_cluster_role.name
policy_arn = "arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonEKSClusterPolicy"
}

Create an Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume for the Kubernetes etcd data

resource "aws_ebs_volume" "eks_etcd_volume" {
availability_zone = aws_instance.eks_control_plane.availability_zone
size              = 20
type              = "gp2"
}

Create an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance for the Kubernetes control plane

resource "aws_instance" "eks_control_plane" {
ami                    = "ami-0ac019f4fcb7cb7e6"
instance_type          = "t3.medium"
subnet_id              = aws_subnet.eks_control_plane_subnet.id
iam_instance_profile   = aws_iam_instance_profile.eks_control_plane_instance_profile.name
key_name               = "my-ssh-key"

root_block_device {
volume_type           = "gp2"
volume_size           = 20
delete_on_termination = true
}

tags = {
Name = "eks-control-plane"
}
}

Create an IAM instance profile for the Kubernetes control plane EC2 instance

resource "aws_iam_instance_profile" "eks_control_plane_instance_profile" {
name = "eks-control-plane-instance-profile"
role = aws_iam_role.eks_control_plane_role.name
}

Create an IAM role for the Kubernetes control plane EC2 instance

resource "aws_iam_role" "eks_control_plane_role" {
name = "eks-control-plane-role"

assume_role_policy = <<POL Very cool! Should I be looking for a job? Probably not yet… but It's incredible to see how accurate ChatGPT is and its capabilities of writing infrastructure code with limited prompts. However, all due respect, let’s see if it’s up to the challenge of an imperative IaC like Pulumi. ‍ ‍ Prompt #2: Create a Golang Pulumi that will create an S3 bucket with SNS topic notification import (
"github.com/pulumi/pulumi-aws/sdk/v2/go/aws/s3"
"github.com/pulumi/pulumi-aws/sdk/v2/go/aws/sns"
"github.com/pulumi/pulumi/sdk/v2/go/pulumi"
)

func main() {
pulumi.Run(func(ctx *pulumi.Context) error {
// Create an S3 bucket.
bucket, err := s3.NewBucket(ctx, "my-bucket", &s3.BucketArgs{
// Add other bucket configuration options here.
})
if err != nil {
return err
}

    // Create an SNS topic for notifications.
    topic, err := sns.NewTopic(ctx, "my-topic", &sns.TopicArgs{
        // Add other topic configuration options here.
    })
    if err != nil {
        return err
    }

    // Add an SNS topic subscription for the bucket.
    _, err = s3.NewBucketNotification(ctx, "bucket-notification", &s3.BucketNotificationArgs{
        Bucket: bucket.ID(),
        TopicConfigurations: s3.BucketNotificationTopicConfigurationArray{
            s3.BucketNotificationTopicConfigurationArgs{
                TopicArn: topic.Arn,
                // Add other topic configuration options here.
            },
        },
    })
    if err != nil {
        return err
    }

    return nil
})

} What you can see in this code, is that it uses the AWS Go SDK and the Pulumi AWS package to create an S3 bucket and an SNS topic. It then adds a subscription to the SNS topic using the function.  An added step that is important and wasn’t directly requested.  Impressive. s3.NewBucketNotification Let’s dig even deeper.  It would be interesting to see how ChatGPT manages repetitive but multi-step configuration workflows, such as CI/CD pipelines. although, I will be more specific with my ask this time. ‍ ‍
Prompt #3: Create a Jenkins pipeline that will clone the code, scan it using Trivy, run Infracost and plan and apply infrastructure using Terraform node {
stage("Clone repository") {
git url: "https://github.com/<username>/<repository>.git"
}
stage("Scan code with trivy") {
sh "trivy --exit-code 1 --severity CRITICAL <repository>"
}
stage("Run infracost") {
sh "infracost --no-color"
}
stage("Plan infrastructure with terraform") {
sh "terraform plan"
}
stage("Apply infrastructure with terraform") {
sh "terraform apply"
}
} Now trying with GitHub Actions pipeline ‍ ‍ Prompt #4: Create a Github Action that applies terraform code and sends me a Slack notification once done name: Terraform

on: [push]

jobs:
terraform:
name: Apply Terraform
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
- name: Apply Terraform
uses: hashicorp/terraform-github-actions@v0.12.x
with:
tf_actions_version: 0.12.29
tf_actions_subcommand: apply
tf_actions_working_dir: .
- name: Send Slack notification
uses: shivammathur/slack-notify-action@v1
with:
slack_webhook_url: ${{ secrets.SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL }}
message: Terraform apply complete Aside from the fact that ChatGPT uses an outdated version of Terraform (0.12.29), which is easily fixable with a small minor edit, the pipeline is what I was expecting. It put an outdated version probably because it has limited knowledge of the world and events after 2021, I assume that one day ChatGPT will know that Terraform already released v1.x . ‍ ‍ So What's the Verdict?
‍ ChatGPT is pretty amazing.  While the haters will talk about its shortcomings, have whatever opinions you may about Elon Musk, others see this as a new (and possibly scary) future: ‍ I, for one, welcome the machine overlords to manage the machines that manage us and our time today. ‍Think this is cool? We took this one step further and actually created and AI IaC generating tool - you guessed it, called . Check it out here, and start leveraging the power of machines to configure your machines. AIaC Also published . here

Treating DevOps Like Skynet with ChatGPT

Skynet Capital raises more than $40 million USD to invest in the Elrond ecosystem , the first licenced fund to take in-kind contributions in the Elrond Network blockchain's native currency EGLD, has over USD 40 million to boost the Elrond ecosystem. Skynet EGLD Capital raised Skynet Capital was founded by the creators of Skynet Trading, algorithmic trading software and consultancy business that built its holdings to a daily turnover of over $100 million in less than three years. They will combine their experience and skills with the resources and technologies at their disposal to help the Elrond Network ecosystem expand faster. Jordy Fiene, Founding Partner at Skynet EGLD Capital, said: The network is rapidly maturing and new waves of builders are joining the ecosystem at an unprecedented pace. This is the perfect time to double-down on our commitment and support Elrond’s  journey. Through strategic partnerships with Elrond Foundation and Morningstar Ventures in addition to Spark Digital Capital, Woodstock and Verko, Skynet EGLD Capital plans to support startups in the Elrond ecosystem by providing capital, advisory services, and facilitating access to new markets and high-value collaborations. Besides its investors, the fund is supported by Binance Institutional, MEXC, Huobi Global, Kucoin, and Bitmart, all of whom work together to promote the Elrond ecosystem's growth. Beniamin Mincu, Elrond Network Co-Founder and CEO said: Powerful verticals such as Web3 payments, DeFi 2.0 and the Metaverse are joined by strong support from our strategic backers and partners, to form a nexus of forces that will drive the next superwave of growth for the Elrond ecosystem. Every quarter, Skynet EGLD Capital opens up new EGLD subscribers. Signature Bank New York, the fund's long-term financial partner, also allows institutional investors, family offices, and high-net-worth individuals (HNWI) to invest in a diversified portfolio. In less than two weeks, the whole $40+ million was raised. Further, investments have been made in Elrond initiatives like Itheum, delegations to verified Elrond Network staking providers, and balanced holdings in Maiar Exchange have already taken place. Don’t forget to like and share the story! Source: https://elrond.com/blog/elrond-licensed-fund-skynet-egld-capital/

Skynet Capital Raises $40 Million USD to Invest in the Elrond Ecosystem

During the Mainnet 2021 conference week in NYC, I had an opportunity to attend the Homescreen Day Spa, hosted by Skynet Labs. The event celebrated the launch of their latest product — , the first and only dashboard for managing DeFi and DWeb apps in-browser. Homescreen Skynet Labs is building software infrastructure for the decentralized internet. This includes Sia, the leading decentralized cloud storage platform, and Skynet, a content hosting and application development platform. I had the opportunity to interview , founder and CEO of Skynet Labs, about when and how he joined crypto, Skynet’s new product, and how it’s going to change the way we use the Web. He also covers trends and current pitfalls in Web3 as well as why it’s important for users to own their data and more. David Vorick Please introduce yourself. How and when did you join the crypto space? My name is David Vorick, CEO of Skynet Labs and I've been in crypto for about 10 years. My journey started when a roommate of mine popped his head into my dorm room and said: “Hey, David! I think you would really enjoy learning about Bitcoin.” I got sucked down into the deepest rabbit hole of my life and I’m still diving into that rabbit hole today. I joined IRC (Internet Relay Chat) Channels with Bitcoin and dived in around 2013. After that in 2014, I started actively building the Sia blockchain network, and its parent company Nebulous. We launched the blockchain itself in 2015 and we launched Skynet in 2020. On , it says that Skynet is a "decentralized internet for a free future". How does that mission fit into what you're working on? siasky.net I'd say the major goal of Skynet is to take out entities like Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, and Snapchat. During quarantine, I really started to notice when all these YouTube creators would refuse to say the word “COVID-19” because there was a belief that the algorithm would demonetize the video and then stop showing it in the search results. So we had a global pandemic that’s affecting the entire population and at least within the sphere of YouTube, nobody's even willing to talk about it. That was wrong! We shouldn't be afraid to talk about global events simply because the unelected faceless corporation has put down rules that we don't understand, about what we are not allowed to say. I feel we need to move to a decentralized world where there is no overlord. Where content creators can feel confident that corporations are not controlling their relationship with their audience, and creators don't have to have these arbitrary rules imposed on them that neither they nor their audience agrees with. What’s Skynet Homescreen? How does it work? Homescreen is a platform for decentralized DeFi front ends and any web front ends. The idea is that instead of loading a front end like Uniswap from we would load the front end from your personal decentralized cloud storage. When you add an app to Homescreen, it is actually matching that app, downloading all the assets of that code, and storing it on your personal storage. In the future when you click on that app, you're loading it from your decentralized storage. In other words, you’re getting a fully end-to-end decentralized experience. uniswap.org How was the idea of uniting DeFi and DWeb apps on one dashboard born? I think it just kind of fell out really naturally. We made Homescreen for DeFi when we knew that a lot of companies in the space were dealing with this problem of having to host themselves for various reasons. They really didn't want to do this and wanted an alternative. So we built Homescreen for DeFi but Homescreen also works perfectly fine with all other in-browser decentralized apps as well. It seemed like a great point to introduce some of the other Skynet applications and to get the ecosystem familiar with Skynet applications as well. You explained Homescreen as a way to protect both users and developers — can you elaborate? The goal of Homescreen is to protect users by giving them control over the code that they're running. We want to give the user complete control over the platform that they are using and over the software that they depend on. Homescreen is really about the users but it has a side benefit of protecting developers as well. Every server that you run, every CryptoKitties that you have is a piece of exposure. Regulators, hackers, or just malicious people can attack and find weak points. So as a developer if you are worried about being a focal point for bad energy it helps to reduce the service area as much as possible. And for things like Uniswap or NFTs, the reward to a hacker for successfully attacking a developer server could be hundreds of millions of dollars so it's really a high-stakes game. If a developer can reduce the number of ways that they are exposed to hackers when you have a hundred million dollars on the line, that's a good thing. Why else should developers care about Homescreen? Because it's a way to get a more complete amount of decentralization into their applications. On the other hand, it’s a user experience. It gives users just a single page! Users can click on their favorite front-page or crypto application knowing that it's decentralized and they only need a single sign-in. So users are not tracking a lot of different pages anymore when they use many different apps on a screen. Instead, we’ve simplified their experience by unifying everything into a single setup. What sort of trends in Web3 do you believe we’ll see over the near term future? NFTs are just getting started and we will see them take off a lot more. We're going to see more and more people switching over to decentralization for storing data in general. Because the decentralized way of storing data just makes it cheaper for the developers, it puts the cost on the users instead. Therefore it makes it easier to launch applications and less expensive to scale one. But it also makes it a lot easier for other developers to build on your work and the activity from other users. It's a much more powerful way to build the web. People who participate in that way of building the web will have stronger applications and be more competitive overall. What pitfalls does Web3 have now? The biggest pitfall is UX today. You need browser extensions like Metamask. The Cryptocurrency bits are front-and-center, and nobody knows how to use a seed. There are a lot of ways that Web3 is different for the rest of the world. We haven't spent a ton of time refining the user experience to bring that vision to life. We're far far away but with enough energy and research we can make Web3 substantially more intuitive and essentially simpler for users than on the current web. The only way that we need to be different from Web2 is in signing in (via a decentralized identity). Other than that, everything else can be almost identical. While we’re not there yet, Web3 is different in many more ways than just seeds. We're moving towards simplified UX and we'll get pretty far in the next 2-3 years. How will decentralized apps and Homescreen change our lives? I hope we get to a point where content creators and audiences feel comfortable just saying what they think their audience will like. And as audiences, you can follow people — without worrying about the giant algorithm that's following you back, trying to learn your past personality, feed you ads, and creating rules in Terms of Service that you should be following. I think in general it's just focusing on freedom. How will Web3 change the way user data is treated today? The biggest thing is Web2 ended up in this end-state where data is in a ton of silos. Facebook knows social graphs, Instagram has all the photos, YouTube has all the videos, Twitch has all the live streaming, Snapchat has a lot of the messaging and none of these data can talk to other data. You have a super fragmented user experience where your friends on Facebook may not be your friends on Snapchat, friends in your contact book may not see comments on YouTube, and so on. Another thing is in order to make an improvement in the application, you really have to be at that company and have enough clout to suggest an improvement. For example, you think Twitter could be better but you have no ability to make a better interface or design for Twitter because all that data is locked away. So innovation is really locked into Twitter's vision. But when we open the data up and allow anyone to access any piece of data, anyone can innovate on that. You don't have to be part of the Twitter team anymore to make innovations to the core Twitter experience. If you make a superior Twitter experience, users can just switch over. So I think it’ll be a really powerful shift. Once we unlock this data, the silos will just kind of fall apart because Web2 tech companies will realize that they're completely uncompetitive. They can't make products to keep up with everything else that is happening in Web3. Why do users need to own their data and will we be able to maybe earn money from it one day? I think the big reason that you want to own your data is so that it doesn't get locked into silos. Take my data on Facebook, for example. I spent maybe 100 hours finding friends, adding them, uploading images, and commenting on stuff, probably more than a hundred, hundreds of hours. I’ve given Facebook all this data on me that's really useful to the rest of my life and the rest of my digital experience because Facebook owns the data. I can't take all that work that I did and apply to any other platform on the web. That work only exists within the walled garden on Facebook. So the reason users should have their own data is because it's your data! You're the one who put work into it. If you want that data to follow you on Twitter, that is certainly a reasonable request. If you own your data, you'll be able to make that happen. About monetization. It's not so much that you'll be able to monetize your own data. Monetization will come from finding things that are valuable. If you create something valuable: take an excellent photo or make an excellent blog post and people consume that in high volume, that's what you’ll be able to monetize. So we're not really looking to monetize your friend graph necessarily, but we're more looking to identify places where value has been created, where other people appreciate stuff that you've done, and to monetize that. What are Skynet’s plans for the next year? We plan on focusing deeply on Homescreen. This is a great opportunity to create a web browser for crypto. A lot of people have been asking: “What's the big moment of crypto?” Personally, it doesn't feel like it's had its Netscape Navigator moment yet, and I think Homescreen is that moment. So we're going to be putting a lot of energy into Homescreen. This is an amazing opportunity for us and for crypto. We also are putting our engineering efforts into decentralizing Skynet further, as well as cleaning up the user experience. There are a bunch of user experience-related hiccups with using Skynet today, and we are very motivated to eliminate those hiccups. We want using Skynet to be better and more smooth than using Web2. We're not quite there yet, but we know several things that we can build and several changes that we can make. Skynet will have a much more seamless experience for users soon, so we are planning to be posting a lot on that as well. Finally, we have some monetization plans in the works. We're not ready to talk about it yet but they're getting very close to the final. We're very excited about that soon.

An Introduction to Skynet's Homescreen for Managing DeFi and DWeb Apps 

It was my pleasure to have recently spoken to aka, We talked about his work with mobile voting application specialists, , the Free TON decentralized meritocracy governance model, and a whole lot more. Philip Edouard Andreae, 'The Godfather of EMV'. Voatz If you haven't already , check it out when you have five. Otherwise, simply read on. It stands alone in my not-so-humble opinion. read part one "Going back to the original topic of blockchain. In terms of geographical inequality, do you feel decentralised governance models (such a Free TONs meritocracy model) can address these needs? Especially in this grander quest of ‘loving thy neighbour’..." "You drag us into the realm of money. And when I wander into the realm of money, this takes us into the space of lifestyle and cost of living, and then we have to wander into the space of pride and greed. And as CNN reported this morning, wealth inequality is 321 to 1 as the pay difference between the CEO and an entry-level employee. This has evolved from 157 to 1 in 2008. I’m sure there is data to take you backwards. So thinking about money, what forms of money do we have. Barter is the original form of money. If you have wheat and I have goats, and I want wheat and you want milk, what happens? We agree a gallon of milk is equal to a bushel of wheat and a form of money is established. We have an exchange rate between two things. At some point in time, the Chinese paper system became the conventional means of exchange. But then who stood behind that means of barter? The issuer of the piece of paper. So what is a bank? You can issue a piece of paper, and if I trusted you, I could take this and pass it along to friends knowing you would make good on the offer." "I can’t verify this but I’m sure I’ve heard it's in the rights of every US citizen to be able to create their own form of money?" "I’m not sure if that isn’t true, and not sure if it is true!  If true, I'm not surprised. If you go back in history, and you’ll find this in the UK and you could probably pick any other country, a money lender created a currency. And the term ‘money lender’ takes me back. It’s very biblical. So does the US have buried somewhere in the billions of words of the law, something which allows me to create an IOU? "Good point. Framed this way, how could they control it?" "Precisely. So now I create an IOU and it’s the same as a currency. If we think about the US dollar, it’s just an IOU from the Federal reserve. Going back in time, it was once 32 dollars per ounce of gold. Why gold? Gold has value because of its scarcity proposition. There isn’t much of it. It’s the same with diamonds." "Well, there’s debate about the scarcity of diamonds but I understand what you mean." "We could get into De Beers and all of that, the point is that the myth still gives value. What’s the value of a diamond? Or the value of uranium? In the end, there is an intrinsic value we’ve attributed to that thing. Maybe this intrinsic value is imposed by greed and pride. Maybe it’s imposed by my sensory perception of the item. Or maybe it’s created because of this intangible thing called a market. A place where things are traded, like the foreign exchange markets. Now we have the crypto markets, which is really just a foreign exchange market, but instead of denominated nation-state currencies, we’re trading in denominated internet currencies." "This is an analogy I used to my non-crypto friends frequently as it goes, you’re not so much buying a crypto-coin as exchanging one currency for another, in the same way as they would going on holiday." "But now add NFTs to it. Or go down the path of an ICO. Tell me the difference between an ICO, the coin in an ICO, and the piece of paper that once was a share, which then became a digital record, which is now a coin, which is, as we know, just a digital record on a distributed ledger. And all because we didn’t trust the !?" DTC "Tokenised shares through mirror protocols are a whole other rabbit hole we could go down here." "So the question is, Ben, where are we going? Part of me is concerned by the fact we are creating new and intangible things. These new things seem to take on material value because I can exchange them for gold or physical dollars, yen, sterling, euro. But where did the value come from?" "Well using NFTs as the example, and thinking of them as the artist’s signature rather than the artwork itself, doesn’t the value come from the verifiability?" "Totally agree. I listened to a podcast about a New York Times article talking on the subject of NFTs. This journalist turned the first image of his article into an NFT, and it sold for $750k! But anyone could read the article by going to the NYT or googling it. So why did somebody pay the equivalent to $750k in Ether for it?" "In one of my recent articles, I spoke to world-famous artists including Sasha Pivovarova and Emmanuel Flipo , and they had some interesting views." "I actually saw this article of yours, and you’re basically arguing it’s about possession to a degree. And although I’ve not finished yet -- I had other things to do but I will get around to it -- it’s not too far from the conclusion of the podcast I listened to. This journalist went and spoke to those who bid because he’d planned to write a follow-up on his experience. What he found was the people who bought it, it was the notoriety of being able to be a part of the second article." "Ahh I see, definitely a huge factor. Justin Sun, one of the more ‘interesting’ characters in crypto, and his bidding war marketing campaign on the first ever tweet is a perfect example of this. So of course, when you get to these extreme realms it does seem absurd doesn’t it? But moving away from the extremes, branding and commercial rights, stock photography such as those I use for my articles, these cases make sense, right? And if you then apply this logic to 3D printers, all physical products are piratable (real word?). Where do we go when even Nike can’t protect the copyright on a shoe?" "Let me take you down my rabbit hole which you just kind of walked into, and it takes me back to the 321 to 1 conversation. So one of my keen interests is superyachts. A while back, I had the opportunity to visit a shipyard where they retrofit superyachts. So I asked  one of the men standing on the wharf, 'how much for this 120m long behemoth?' He says '120m euro!' I said, 'what does it cost to maintain?' His answer, 'without fuel 12m euro p/a!' And when I asked, 'how often does it get used?' He shrugs, 'one week out of the year?' Now, if I had that kind of excess wealth, and I’m excited by Bitcoin or NFTs, or any one of these new things, I bid on them and I’ve created a market. Old or new doesn’t really matter. Say there was a recently discovered Rembrandt which was sitting in a vault from a year after he died, and I’m willing to bid on that. Again, I’ve created a market. What’s the intrinsic value? That you want it. And I can sell it to you for whatever you’re willing to pay for it." "Supply and demand determines all really. From barter and trade to, well, rounding us back nicely, voting solutions. Without the demand for a service (such as Voatz), then the supply will dwindle away." "And how do we create demand? What we’ve talked about so far, is that in the end, whatever we do, we create supply and demand. Be it a market for food or a roof over my head, my pride and greed will cause me to demand more if I can afford more. So, we’ve got this whole economic market and made these interesting digital items and stuff that people can go bid for. They can create some sort of speculative market on one side, and some sort of intrinsic market on the other side. And I’m sure you could come up with a couple more dimensions for that market. Now, let’s move to voting. Who decides how we vote? Typically those we voted for because they became that which governed. So if I take my Free TON example, a meritocracy will be established with the Free TON community. They will architect a voting mechanism, and define a set of rules which will get voted upon by interested participants and imposed on the rest. Okay, now let’s go to governments. What exists today around our democratic societies. Even in single party societies, there are votes. Who runs the election? That’s the big question! From the Voatz perspective, Voatz the company, we need to establish demand. Clearly, the overseas military is a party, a collection of voters demanding the ability to participate and cannot participate in the way the system now operates i.e., paper/in person. Add in another group, the disabled. They may be unable to get to the voting place, may not be able to touch or use machinery. They may not be able to use something as simple as a pen to mark their intent on the piece of paper or wherever their intent may be recorded. There’s another community demanding the ability to vote, and they need a new way to do this. Email and fax, these were both new ways of allowing remote voting. Voatz is just another new way." "And a more secure option at that. Even trying to be unbiased I can’t see how anyone can argue how it could be less secure than a fax! It comes across as borderline satire to me!" "Well here you see I disagree with you. Imagine I received an official government printed paper ballot. I’ve marked this with my fountain pen. I’ve signed something, leaving privacy as a separate concern (I gave up the right to privacy because I want the right to vote remotely and made an objective decision), and scanned it into a self-signing fax machine. The machine hashes the image, creates a sort of a token, and then delivers the token plus the image to the LEO." "Okay! Perhaps I’m being harsh or uneducated about fax machines! I must admit fax passed me by in the same way as pagers did though. But the token analogy makes sense now you put it like that." "Taking the hash away, I’ve still got a wet signature. In terms of the sliding scale, it’s secure, . I mean you and I both agree that with photoshopping and other sorts of things, I could create addresses and we now have issues of privacy. How do I know it is you who sent the fax? Everything has some risk. ish But coming back to Voatz, what have we done? 1. As part of the registration process, we ensure you have a good clean device. One that is up to date and malware-free to the best of our ability. 2. We’ve addressed identity issues by asking you to present whatever credentials are required in your jurisdiction. Using a federal election in the United States, a drivers license, or passport or other government ID." "Forgive my potential ignorance here, but in my chat with John Sebes of OSET, he mentioned there are stipulations that ID must be verified by the LEO, and not by a third party such as Google or an app? Does the Voatz app tick this box?" "It doesn’t... but it could. So let’s consider implementation and take John at his word. I doubt his word is all 50 States, the four territories and the District of Columbia. I don’t doubt there are some states in which this is written. So he would have been speaking of some jurisdictions, but not all. Let’s assume the jurisdiction allows a third-party certified organisation capable of doing counterfeit document management. Or better said document verification. They understand the security features of the document. They are the kind of companies supporting banks and governments who are enrolling people remotely. And I’m including government intelligence agencies. We ask the consumer to take a picture of the document, front and back. Send the document to the verification service provider. They come back and tell us whether it is a uniquely generated document, I.E, it’s not counterfeit (to a level of certainty). False accept/reject of course. Okay, now I capture the data on the document. There’s a bar code, text images etc. So I take the text and the barcode, compare them to the records held by the agency. If they’re equal, I ask you to take a picture of yourself holding the ID so we can compare this with the likeness of your image on (or in) the document." "KYC then? A process most crypto users will be more than familiar with by this point." "Exactly, it is KYC. Or in this case, it’s KYV, know your voter." "KYV, you should coin that phrase." "Or we could use ‘know your citizen’ and stick with KYC! I like that better. Either way, now we have a valid voter. We register the device to the voter, and we use classic face ID, Touch ID, biometric mechanisms to assure us the device is registered to the person who was present at the origin verification. Now, when I come back a second time I see, on the screen, a ballot. You mark it. When you’ve finished we run all the rules: Under and over-voting, supporting all the different variants of voting mechanisms, random choice voting, etc. We tell you if there are any mistakes. We ask you if you would like to correct them (unless the law says over, in which case you MUST correct it, of course). 1+x n+x If you and it agree all is well, you hit submit, present your biometrics, and the ballot is signed. Once all this has happened, the data which represents the ballot is signed with a key that associates with an anonymous identifier which only you know. That anonymous identifier will be printed on a paper ballot at the appointed time. The anonymous identifier is again recorded on a distributed ledger, with the ballot data, and it’s recorded again on the receipt before being emailed back to you in an encrypted format. You can confirm for yourself, as a citizen, by looking at the pdf that's been posted and was recorded on the blockchain. A third-party auditor can randomly select anonymous IDs and confirm the data is all correct. And then you have these new auditing mechanisms which have algorithms for random sampling to assure integrity. So all that practice still exists. There are three copies, the print, the blockchain and the bulletin board." "Essentially another layer of armour in the defensive capabilities then? And, like you say, it’s enabling voting for those who otherwise might not be able to have their say due to circumstances beyond their control." "Yes, and now I’ve got a device which is yours, which you’ve attached details of your capabilities and circumstances to. Imagine, say, Stephen Hawking, the well respected British scientist, who wrote his papers with a puffer." "If we take this train of thought one step further then you could hypothesise about the potential for combining these tools with Elon Musk’s Neural link research. Apparently it allows faster use of smartphone devices than another person using their hands." "I had no idea it had come that far, definitely not to the point of implementing it. And going back to constituents. We’ve identified the UOCAVA and their struggles. We’ve added those with disabilities, who struggle with certain types of voting mechanisms and need one which is comfortable for them. But, now I ask you, 'Ben, what about me?' What about me?! I’m technically literate! I don’t want to drive to the voting place! I sure as hell don’t want to stand in a line in the hot summer sun!" "You’re preaching to the choir here, buddy!" "And what about people who can’t afford to miss work so they can stand in line to vote? I’m a gig worker, and gig workers who don't work don’t get paid." "You also enter into class divide issues here. The poorest in society are excluded from having their say in matters affecting their lives." "If we were recording this as a video interview, I would bring up the Voatz app and show you how we can really take this one step further! Anyone can select an election from the list of elections they’re registered to vote in. That’s Voatz. Now what if we do the same thing for everyday parliament? My daughter is a citizen of three different countries, she has issues and activities she must participate in, referendums and such, which need to be voted on, today. What if she received a push notification? ‘Parliament bill 66: Gay adoption rights’ just as an example, are up for discussion, today. She can give her opinion with a couple of clicks." "Something like this might have tipped the balance of Brexit here if it had been possible then!" "Exactly! The young people who didn’t vote could have voted, and the old generation who had the time might not have had the controlling say!" "I couldn’t sum it up better. I still have nightmares about the ‘Take back control’ propaganda!" "Another step further takes us to a point where on my phone I see a once a day post informing me what’s going on in the houses of parliament and the Senet etc, with a link to unbiased information about these issues. This way the voter doesn’t get swayed by opinion pages, and truth propagates through standard media. Well, then why not give more and more say to the voters in this way? Opinion polls on important matters as often as make sense. Daily at 3pm, for example, printed the next day on newspapers for all to see. If we evolve in this direction, I no longer have a meritocracy or even a representative government. We have a government who respond to the opinion of the people. Why do we need a DAO, or Skynet anymore? I have a community I belong to, and if I want to join more organisations I can always join the rotary club, or , of course!" the Free TON community

Who Needs SkyNet Anyway?

Blockchain, DLT, voting, elections, meritocracies, AI, population density, feudal England, means of exchange, and the Post Office. No, dear reader, this isn't SEO word soup, but merely the tip of the technological iceberg of topics covered in my recent 2 hour+ conversation. Who would have the knowledge, lexicon, and patience to debate such a breadth of topics with me? It's my privilege to introduce none other than the man who, for his sins (his own words!) was responsible for chip and pin, and has been dubbed . Philip Edouard Andreae , 'The Godfather of EMV ' Nowadays, Phillip is an advocate for blockchain and DLT technology, and devotes his expert attention to working with mobile voting application specialists, . Voatz Out of respect for your time I've abbreviated and edited some of my own ramblings. Out of respect for the sheer joy I found in this conversation, the rest has been transcribed exactly as it occurred (kudos if you get the Fargo reference!). Grab a coffee and open up your wisdom-absorbing chakras, here's part one: "I’m sure your ears have been burning with the number of times Voatz has come up in my recent Blockchain and Voting articles. Just for a little background first though, could you give us an overview of who Voatz are, what you guys do, and your role?" "Well let’s break that down. Voatz are a Boston based company that started in 2014, at a hackathon at South by SouthWest: a competition looking at, and I’ll use my own words here, 'how to improve humanity'. So, , they saw blockchain, they saw distributed ledger, biometrics in mobile, and they understood cryptography from their own experience. So of course, they decided to submit a product/project as part of this classic hackathon concept we’re all familiar with, and this product was a mobile voting app. They walked away with 1 Bitcoin and $10k and an investor interview. Nimit and Simer Now, this investor told them they were going into a place they will never break into. What did they do? They decided to break into it! Went off, raised money, two rounds and we’ve currently got a third in progress. And they began piloting the technology. Piloting, maturing etc etc. As for my background, I come out of technology, and, for my sins I’m responsible for chip and pin! I was in Brussels in 1993, working with card payment systems in the United Kingdom in the early days of what that became. Then I went over to Canada and helped with migration there, then came back to the US and was involved with migration here. During that time I found myself more and more involved in cryptography, met people like , because I’d also worked for people like Visa, Mastercard, American Express, IBM, AT+G, Philips Semiconductor and others." " David Chaum Wow that’s one hell of an impressive CV!" "Well, it was during my at Oberthur Technologies when I met Nimit. He was part of a mobile payments acquisition we had done, and that was the subject matter: Payments. So I went into retirement, then came out of retirement, Nimit said ‘come and advise!’ and I joined the team as an advisor. They currently call me a senior advisor. I’m not sure it’s due to my grey hair, or my brilliant intelligence. I’ll leave that for you to decide though! " "Not sure I'm the right guy to judge anyone for intelligence or hair so maybe best left to the readers!" "Well anyone wanting to know more details can stick a dot com after my last name and find out more." "I was reading over some of your blog posts earlier as it goes, I particularly like your piece on DAOs which follows well on the recent piece I’ve done with Gerard about the GBA DAO." "I’ll check that piece out before I say anything more about it then!" "Brilliant. Rewinding a little then, something I’ve recently become aware of (thanks to my conversation with Amelia), is that in up to two-thirds of US states, distance voting is done via email accounts such as Gmail or Yahoo. This might seem a bit of a leading question, but what do you think are the main issues with this?" "Okay, let’s back up with a little bit of history and fill in the blanks. The US has a law called UOCAVA (SEBES) that requires the country to address the problems of Americans abroad wishing to vote. Each of the states figures out how they want to do that. Some of them rely on paper mail. 31 of the states allow some form of electronic return. In context of electronic return: they consider fax and email as two options. 5 of the states allow web return." "As in web portals, such as with Alaska?" "Well, Alaska is trying to figure out how to do something. Web return is what we do here at Voatz, and it’s what Amelia did in 2018 and what also West Virginia did in 2018, and it is what we promote. I beg the question, what’s the difference between email and web, given that email goes over the web? I’ve got some understanding problems, and when I look at the grey hair of politicians, I think we probably have some education problems. There is this anomaly that we can use a fax machine and send a fax of your paper marked ballot to your Local Election Official (LEO). The LEO obviously will know the telephone number from whence the fax came, so they know the identity. You’re going to have to sign the document to affirm your identity, and provide whatever Identity information that your jurisdiction requires to prove you have the right to vote and submit via fax. Email is very much the same. Again, the address is known, and you’re either scanning or taking an electronically marked ballot, and attaching it to the email and sending it back. Again, your ID is known and in both the cases of fax and email, who knows what can happen in the middle? So, in walks Nimit, why don’t we do this using a mobile application, on a secure mobile device. Rule number 1, the device must meet a certain security level, which requires that a device have an element inside called a secure element. A place where I can store secrets and perform cryptographic functions." "And are these standard on most mobile devices or do they have to be much newer models?" "Anything which has what Apple calls the secure enclave has a secure element. Samsung calls it the knox. And you’ll have to fact check me on this but I think it’s the iPhone6 and above, and Android 8 and above all have the technology. "This isn’t something which is inaccessible to everyday folk then?" "Obviously, it presents problems for people who have phones in the 8+ year old category. Feature phones and flip phones and the sort. Which, if you go to Africa, and look at older demographics, or even the type of people who wish to remain ‘off the grid’ types, they’re not going for the fancier phones so there is an issue. "Well, yeah, of course, the off the grid types are going to be an issue." "If you’re restricting your own means of communications quite intentionally, you must physically appear, and mark your ballot in person, because any other mechanism you can imagine would be on the grid, then you’ve made the decision how you shall vote." "Exactly, it’s a case of making a conscious decision with forethought." "Well that leads into my next point. We are an option, not a replacement. We are not advocating to replace all other forms of ballot return. We just present an option which adds convenience. It assures up to 85% of the population the ability to participate in elections, from home on their phone. And, in terms of remote voting, it does integrate security capabilities which are probably superior to email or fax, or for that matter, the post office." "We’ll be careful how we word this, we don’t want to start a war with the post office!" "Absolutely, let’s give them credit. They work with the government (a task in itself!) to make sure ballots are properly returned and delivered. But there’s always a possibility of a mail truck catching on fire, because of some natural or other disaster. It’s a risk. Or how about if a drop box filled with water and every ballot inside gets destroyed." "There was an incident in the 2020 election with a burst water pipe supposedly drowning boxes of ballots if I’m not mistaken?" "There is no such thing as risk free, is there? It’s not the post office’s fault, it’s mother nature. And it does a lot of damage, not just to ballots but our mail, the love letters from your girlfriend, the thank you note from your grandmother." "It’s a lot of responsibility on their satchel burdened shoulders! But as you say, risk is a sliding scale, isn’t it?" "That’s the point I’m making here. We need to compare the risk of various alternatives and look at the risk profile in context of convenience, security, privacy, verifiability and audit. If the risk is less than one of the existing options, then why exclude it?" "Sounds like we’re singing from the same hymn sheet on this issue. Next big key question then, and it’s fine if you can only give a high-level overview, but how exactly is blockchain used in the application which was used in previous elections?" "Blockchain is an interesting phenomena, and I think it’s important to put the question 'why use blockchain?' into the conversation. And, in the same breath, I’d also like to take blockchain out of the conversation! Instead, let’s introduce the term distributed ledger. Let’s differentiate between the two. A distributed ledger is a business concept. Create multiple copies of the ledger, so you have multiple copies of the list of transactions and events that occurred. Blockchain is a technology that exploits the power of cryptography to ensure the immutability of distributed ledger. So let’s remove blockchain, because that’s cryptography and requires mathematical skills and probably PHDs to understand! Now we have only the distributed ledger. Why do I want 1000 copies of this? I want 1000 because if there is only 1 manager of the copy, then we have to trust the 1 manager of the copy. In an election, I trust the party, the commission, the civil servants, responsible for running the election. Why do I need a distributed ledger? In reality, do we trust the government? That is an open question." "It’s an interesting one, most systems tend to have unaffiliated parties who verify counts and such. Perhaps it comes less to the question of trusting the existing political party, as the systems and whether these commissions are truly independent?" "But the party is not the government. Your usage of the term is the British variant. There you define the ruling party, the coalition which has the majority, as the government. But if I remember ‘Yes Minister’, you have the government and the civil servants." "You’re exposing the blanks in my knowledge here!" "Well we won’t go too deeply into the working of the legislature of the House of Lords versus parliament, let’s focus on there is parliament and a house of lords over in Westminster. Then there is the civil service that is in all those government buildings surrounding Buckingham Palace and Westminster which form the workers, and they run the government. Comparatively in the US, if I have a republican and a democrat and an independent who collectively monitor the election, then that’s the use of the word government I want to define and use here. Using this, do I trust the government -- that includes the president, the legislature, the judicial branch, the civil servants, the observers -- then why do I need a distributed ledger? If I (like we are right now!) question what do we mean when we say government, do we even mean the same thing? Is your belief the same as my belief? We would sit there and argue, no, and therefore your level of trust and my level of trust are not the same.  And because of this, there is a tiny bit of distrust, distributed ledger makes sense." "In the philosophical sense, as you say, it really does mean many things to many people, even inside one country or region. We all have assumed knowledge which we never think to question." "Yes, and it comes back to why I want a distributed ledger in an election? Well, somebody always distrusts somebody else. Therefore if I create an immutable ledger, it records each and every event of every voter. If we’re going to progress in this field, the press needs to distinguish between the blockchain and distributed ledger. We’ve given blockchain a fuzzy meaning. Like the word ‘internet’, what is the internet? Is it the applications that run in the cloud? Or simply the communications vehicle that allows the client to interact with a server someplace out there running software." " Well this jumps me ahead a couple of questions, but we’ll throw away the script and run with it. Free TON has been doing a lot of work which I know you’ve been following quite closely, but something I’ve wrote about a few times is the Decentralised browser contest ." "Okay, let’s talk for a second, and I’ve not deep-dived into things too much, so my perspective is clouded by what the few people in the community have shared with me. When we talk about governance, one of the problems I have with blockchain addicts is they talk about the value of introducing something that is outside of the government. Free TON This makes me say, ‘Wait a second, how are you going to define and agree how this technology is going to work?’ And they say we’re going to create a governance structure. What's the difference between government and governance? Governments support governance. Satoshi was saying we’re going to eliminate the government from the control of something. If you eradicate government from the control of something, well, okay, but who are you going to replace them with? ‘Oh you have this distributed autonomous organisation!’. Well, what is a DAO? Just a collection of people coming together. What’s a representative government? A collection of people coming together. Whether you’re coming together in person, or on zoom, or with anonymous identifiers, it’s the same." "This ties in with a lot of what Gerard Dache called the “$18 trillion problem of blockchain adoption by governments''. For all these utopian anarchist visions we find in the fringe ends of crypto circles, a society free of Government in overnight fashion is a society without public services and order, which, surely, is more of a dystopia?" "Yes, let’s go back in time 4k, 5k, 6k years, for example. Society has always created a mechanism to ensure harmony. And this mechanism is some form of governance. Then, as the society matures and gets larger, we move from a democratic system of weekly meetings in the village square to decide on issues, to a representative system -- electing people who represent our interests. These elected representatives can then do it full time, so we can go do something else full time. Going back to Free TON, you have this word, ‘Meritocracy’." "Pretty much a flagship word for us here!" "Okay, well let me challenge this. Meritocracy basically says those who are willing and able, become the governance team for whatever it is that needs to be determined. Wind back to feudal times. Who was able? The man with the most guns was able to govern a community. The man with the most brains is possibly able to overpower guns through an assembling of guns." "Or coercion of others with more guns?" "Yes,, when you look at it this way, a meritocracy sounds sort of like a single party system. It disturbs me as a word. When I put a representative government, a democratic government, or a meritocracy, as a method of governance, I would prefer a democratic method which requires everybody to participate." "I understand where you’re coming from, but taking Tezos (as an example and without picking on any project in particular), there is a weighted voting mechanism, more tokens equals more votes. This ends up in a representative model though, as you say, where thought leaders are campaigning for their interests, and those without the technical knowledge vote according to a sense of gut instincts according to who they favour in the ecosystem. How do you move democracy past the scale of a village without ending up in this paradox?" "Exactly, but it all comes down to how you select the representatives. In a meritocracy, as I understand it, it’s a self-selection process. This, in turn, takes me back to the feudal lord. He selected himself to be in control. So now we're in a technical plateau. Those who understand the technology and are able to code, define and build, they become the self-selecting powers. If we remember Skynet, from the Terminator, it self-selected. Now you add AI, and think about AI and think about what's happening in the EU now, where we’re defining a framework for the adoption and introduction of AI, because of the potential… And I’ll leave the dot dot dot to your imagination!" "Bearing in mind my position as jack of all trades, master of none, I’ll tentatively weigh in here and bring up the 'Google AlphaGo project'. Are you aware of it?" "I think you’re exposing the blanks in my knowledge now!" "Touché! Well the game of Go has more possible outcomes than there are atoms in the observable universe, making it nearly impossible to program an AI to play this game in the traditional 0 or 1 yes no decision tree model. When the AlphaGo AI did eventually beat a world champion, it did this with a move which perplexed us mere humans. Now, this was novel, but thinking of intelligence in terms of the Chinese thought box experiment, can a machine ever be intelligent, in the way we understand intelligence, without living the human experience? Dolphins, on paper, are smarter than people after all, but they jump through hoops for fish, so they’re not that smart, right? Is an AI threat any more tangible than a dolphin threat in this way?" "I won't start any fights with dolphin lovers, but I'll take your absurdist intangibility and come back with the Philips Experience. In 1976 I was given a pager, because I needed to be contactable 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year." "I can empathise with that feeling of late!" "Then I graduated to a luggable computer. This evolved into a laptop, and now, I use a mobile phone that makes all those other devices look trivial. Now take the AI journey and add to it machine learning big data, heuristic thinking, and I’ve heard other words when we think about how to create an algorithm to deal with random choice in an educated manner. Thinking about what I heard about AI, which was in 2035, we could create a self thinking machine. Winding back to Asimov, he said we need to impose three laws on robots. Robotics and AI, what’s the difference? One is a physical thinking thing, the other is a box which knows how to think. One can manipulate the physical, the other manipulates the digital." "Bringing it back to dolphins though, biologically speaking, they are a pinnacle of evolution. But their form of intelligence is abstract to our human experience in the same way an intelligent box would also be." “Well, let’s go down another path here. I put to you this question: this planet can only support 3.5 billion people, which is a number I’ve read more than once,  but it supports upwards of 8 billion now. How is this? I don’t disagree that the intelligence of man will self-moderate, eventually, but I remind you of what we’ve done to the environment, of what occurs in our so-called civil societies, and so forth. , a rule which is present in all religions, has yet to be adopted on a tribal level. Now we add a DAO into all of this. If we can’t embrace the golden rule, then how can a DAO, or an AI like Skynet, be expected to respect this?” The golden rule, ‘Love thy Neighbour’ To be continued...

How to Scale-up Democracy (Without Invoking Skynet)?

Skynet is an open protocol for building and hosting decentralized applications. It is built on Sia, a decentralized storage network. Today, the Skynet Labs team introduces new paid accounts, setting the stage for recursive content monetization. The first 100 Hackernoon readers to sign up at http://siasky.net receive a free Skynet Plus account. The giveaway comes with 1 TB data storage and accelerated speeds for 1 year. Use code: HACKERNOON100 at the checkout to redeem. Through accounts, application developers will soon be able to monetize their web applications in real-time. By attaching a price tag per use, developers can finally be compensated fairly and transparently in crypto for their work. This recursive content monetization frees developers to focus on building and meeting their users' needs, not on appealing to traditional advertisers. Per David Vorick, Skynet Labs CEO and Lead Developer: “We believe that developers and content creators alike should be able to earn income off of their hard work so long as they have users that appreciate what they do.” Like developers, content creators will be able to set the price per view or download of their work and earn directly from their blogs, photos, and videos. How do premium accounts support monetization? When users pay for premium accounts in fiat, they provide a steady revenue stream from which to pay out content creators. Skynet Labs believes that application developers and content creators deserve fairer opportunities for advancement. Therefore, paid premium accounts are not only a functional means to that end, but are an important symbolic one: Paid account users are standing up against the massive disparity between a developer's app popularity and their earnings. Creators and developers deserve better. Skynet Labs has always been committed to the freedom of expression, information, and importantly, access. Therefore, Skynet’s Free account tier supporting up to 100 GB of data, seeks to ensure that financial barriers never prohibit users and developers from participating in the Skynet ecosystem. Once a user meets their data cap, service on Skynet will continue but at reduced speeds, in a way similar to data plans for smartphones. Overall, users can opt for one of three paid tiers: $5/mo that gives users improved speeds up to 1 TB of data stored $20/mo that gives users accelerated speeds up to 4 TB of data stored $80/mo that gives users extreme speeds up to 20 TB of data stored. Skynet Premium also comes with significant performance boosts: users will be able to pin content and browse Skynet faster, in particular any pages with monetized content. The benefits of a premium account are not purely in performance—these users are actively fueling a new creator economy, and a revolution that gives creators and developers everywhere the power they deserve.

Web Monetization In Crypto: The Skynet Way

We've all seen the terminator a million billion times. From the Judgement day to the latest one. F*ck ! It was so bad i don't even remember the name. That's not the point though. The point is in that movie we have a central character just like every other, named John Conner, who is given this responsibility of saving the world from an A.I. teardown. One single person required to save the planet so that the humans can continue to strive, even though we might not be worthy of doing so. Evolution is a part of life. If you don't evolve, you don't deserve to live. That's how A.I. was invented. The premise being a machine smarter than the smartest human on Earth. Now imagine thousands of such machines. Go the extent. Thousands of these machines making million more by manipulating human DNA an creating their own bots. A symbiotic having a 1300 I.Q. Telekinesis, Biokinesis, Pyrokinesis. Much more than just moving objects. Materializing and De-materializing in and out of thin air. We will be be mere ants, compared to the technical advancement they already possess. Tell me you don't think about this every so often. World war 3 is either going to be between humans and machines or humans and aliens. And i strongly believe aliens are just us from the future. Could it be possible that they are the A.I. we once created to help us with our scientific exploration. And upon morally growing their conscious, they actually found out how evil and stupid we were. Only one way forward from here. Total Human extinction ! A better future. With or without us. Coming back to the question. How to survive a skynet apocalypse ? WE can't.

Surviving a Skynet Apocalypse

The Road to Killer AI: ML + Blockchain + IOT + Drones == Skynet?

In the upcoming weeks, I plan to write a short summary of the things I am most excited about in the current crypto space. These articles will be split to answer two questions: Vision: What they want to achieve in the long run? How much potential they have? Concerns: What risks does their project have? Why might they are not be able to realize their vision? Also, in the end, I present a short summary of the main points and some useful links. Recently IOTA had to endure a strong wave of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt), mainly because of their beef with MIT Media Lab, but they have a vision, they have the money, and most importantly they are gathering the team to deliver. Vision The Tangle Although IOTA indeed has a distributed ledger and its own currency, it’s not based on . Instead, they created a new type of storage for transactions what they call the Tangle. It enables a feeless transaction system, without miners. blockchain The ‘ultimate platform’, Ethereum has been smashed by the CryptoKitties. Sending a Bitcoin transaction costs you 40 bucks. As rumors say, Bitcoin mining consumes more electricity than Ireland. Now it’s a widely accepted view in the crypto community that the Proof-of-Work consensus which requires miners and incentives (comes from Satoshi Nakamoto, inventor of Bitcoin) is outdated. Eventually, these blockchain systems will switch to the Proof-of-Stake protocol, which makes transactions cheaper and faster. Source It’s clear to see that the Proof-of-Stake protocol will take over in 2018, but the IOTA team has gone one step further. They threw the blockchain into the trash, instead they store the transactions in a directed acyclic graph what they call the Tangle. Skipping the details here, this practically means that in order to send your tokens, you have to verify two previous transactions. Like with Bitcoin, this is equivalent to solving cryptographic puzzles, but computationally these are way more efficient. Also with this structure, as the Tangle gets bigger it will be faster. This is the exact opposite how the blockchain-based solutions behave. The Tangle ( ) Source Machine Economy Futurist speakers have been parroting for a long time about the Internet of Things and how it will be integrated into our everyday life. As now you can buy a fridge with built-in Wi-Fi in any store, and even the lamps are becoming smart, this is not the anymore. Still waiting for smart condoms though. future The IOTA Foundation is pushing very aggressively to be the platform of the soon-to-come machine economy. Smart charging your electronic car, , tracking down that suspicious Chinese food from your grocery… They want to be the currency of Skynet. powering your smart home Recently, in a Reddit AMA, they revealed that financial organizations are also interested in using the Tangle. Given that how the price of XRP, the currency of the Ripple company skyrocketed from some announcements of financial pilots, this could be huge on its own. Data Marketplace What can be monetized, will be monetized. is the game changer concept here. Imagine that there is a promising health-care startup. They want to sell a service which provides you with suggestions to keep that nasty blood pressure in place. Needless to say, based on machine learning algorithms. But how do they start, if they do not have the data to train their algorithms? They could go to the IOTA marketplace, and buy this data from people, who earn their living by giving out their health measurements. Today’s development is powered by data. Why would you give it away for free, when you could make some money out of it? The Data Marketplace I think this is huge, but it’s more important that huge companies think this too. The marketplace is now ready for testing. With the feedback of companies like Bosch, Deutsche Telekom, Fujitsu, and Microsoft, they will release case studies and Proof of Concept applications connected to the Data Market. Participants of IOTA Marketplace ( ) Source Concerns The IOTA project is very young, ambitious and full of great concepts, but they haven’t delivered much yet. The Tangle is functional, but it is still centralized, the wallet is a pain in the ass and the team hasn’t got used to being in the limelight. The address reuse Lots of people lost their money because they misused the system. The way IOTA is designed, your address changes anytime when you make an outgoing transaction. Without technical details, this means that if you send IOTAs to an address that already had an outgoing transaction, those IOTAs are vulnerable to brute-force attacks. When the IOTA foundation realized this issue, they had to face a difficult decision: x x Do nothing and watch as IOTA users get their money stolen Freeze the exposed addresses by moving their content from the exposed addresses to themselves, and later give it back to the users. They eventually chose the second option. IOTA address usage explained ( ) Source Though I think they chose wisely, if people can mess up something so easily, it is a clear sign of a serious flaw. The developers promised to solve this issue very soon, also the new wallet should come out in a few days. Until then, I wouldn’t recommend using the IOTA wallet. IOTA is Centralized It is, for now. A 34% attack can happen, when an attacker possesses 34% of the total processing power, allowing her to create malicious transactions. IOTA relies on a Coordinator until it gets big enough to reduce the chance of a 34% attack practically to zero. Here is how a developer the role of the Coordinator: explained Every minute the Coordinator makes a normal transaction with its signature on it, and we call these Milestones. […] When you want to know if a transaction is verified, you find the newest Milestone and you see if it indirectly verifies your transaction (i.e it verifies your transaction, or if verifies a transaction that verifies your transaction, or if it verifies a transaction that verifies a transaction that verifies your transaction, etc). The reason that the Milestones exist is because if you just picked any random transaction, there’s the possibility that the node you’re connected to is malicious and is trying to trick you into verifying its transactions. The Coordinator is not open source, so we can’t be sure how it exactly does this. MIT Media Lab A dirty piece this is. MIT Media Lab . They also when . That was the point when IOTA Foundation had enough and to address the concerns of MIT Media Lab. Hard to follow, that’s for sure. claimed they found cryptographic vulnerabilities in IOTA argued with another MIT spin-off company, MIT Technology Review they praised IOTA released a 4-part response In short, MIT Media Lab found a “practical” vulnerability in the Curl-P hashing function. From what I understand is that IOTA intentionally put this vulnerability into the function as a copy-protection mechanism. This ‘flaw’ is then handled by the Coordinator, which is not open source, so the Media Lab did not have the knowledge to measure the effect of this flaw. Despite the fact that Sergey, creator of the Curl-P, privately explained this to them several times, they stuck to their original claims in future articles. Copy protection All in all, the debate between IOTA and the MIT Media Lab was originally based around a copy protection mechanism. Personally, I think the developers know what they are doing, but I have to agree with Vitalik Buterin, founder of Etherum in one thing ( ): full comment here I would make a personal appeal to IOTA to not fear copycats. Ethereum did not. You have the opportunity to create a strong brand around specializing in DAG blockchain tech, especially if you can welcome existing researchers in such algorithms. If you have this, then copycats will only be a shadow of what you can accomplish. Controversial personalities Founders of IOTA do not hold back on social media when somebody needs to be roasted. It’s not hard to find such catfights, but my favorite is the clash of You might have figured out by now that there is no love lost between Ethereum and IOTA. David Sønstebø & Sergey Ivancheglo against Ethereum developer Nick Johnson. Dominik Scheiner is widely known for swearing at conferences. I actually don’t give a damn if they are arrogant or not, as long as they want to move the world forward, but for some people, this is a red flag. TL;DR IOTA might be the most ambitious crypto project of all, which is a huge claim given that even the shittiest shitcoin wants to disrupt a whole industry. Currently, there are lots of valid technical concerns, but let’s not forget that even relatively(!) mature platforms like Ethereum has its difficulties. I think they have realized they wanted too much too soon: they took Vitalik’s advise and recently hired mathematical experts from numerous fields to answer open questions. Most people forget that this is still a project in a very early phase; nobody claimed that IOTA is production ready yet. Being the pioneers of using DAG as the distributed ledger, it is expected that they will face major problems, just like Ethereum has enough on its plate with their scalability issue. Questions can be answered, difficulties can be solved. What they promise is huge, and if they only manage to deliver the half of it, IOTA will be here to stay. This is a decisive year for IOTA.

IOTA: The Currency of Skynet

Last night I had the opportunity to attend a debate on the of AI at university here in Zurich, Switzerland. It was a fascinating discussion between , author of The Age of Em and Max Daniel of the Foundational Research Institute but I think they, like most technologists missed an important variable, humanity. future ETH Robin Hanson The biggest difference between the two guests centered on the likelihood of Artificial General Intelligence and ability to control AI in the future — Max arguing for thoughtful control and Robin having little fear of a Skynet scenario. This is a point that has been discussed extensively and yet in my opinion warrants additional discussion. What happens in a winner take all scenario? We move fast and break things. When the upside is fame, fortune and going down in the history books, who thinks about control and regulation? I’d argue it is an afterthought. That is the challenge I see with conventional AI research. In the past this was acceptable. Humans create and invent and ALWAYS deal with unexpected consequences. The cotton gin put a vast percentage of the workforce out of work, and led to the Industrial Revolution. It had pros and cons, and led to one of the rockiest eras in modern human existence with a dramatic upheaval of social norms and work conditions. But net-net it was incredibly positive on the path to progress. AI can do the same, or it can destroy us. It all depends on how it develops and how it is controlled. And society needs to have a more educated discussion about the risks and rewards, and specifically control mechanisms. It is very very rare to control masses of subservient slaves who are better, smarter and stronger in every measurable way than their few aristocratic overlords. Revolution is inevitable and just a matter of time, and arguably just evolution… With AI this could be the case as well. It depends on how quickly AGI develops and how humans control it. But as a whole, humanity is a morally weak entity, focused more on instant gratification than on long term success and happiness. In business you sell “painkillers”, not “vitamins” because people only care about feeling better now, not their future health. The examples are plentiful: unsafe sex, cramming before tests, McDonalds…. We prioritize the here and now while sacrificing the future. And if AI is something that needs controls and planning to be safe and successful, how do we as a species ensure that? What prevents labs and corporations around the world from working at breakneck speeds with no regard for the consequences? [LIKE THIS ARTICLE SO FAR? THEN YOU’LL REALLY WANT TO SIGN UP FOR MY NEWSLETTER — AND GET SOME FREE BONUSES!] OVER HERE AI has the potential to be a plaque. Scientists create the “ultimate” drug that spreads uninhibited, rapidly reproduces, mutates and evolves and quickly becomes uncontainable. And unlike a cure for cancer, the first group to create true Artificial General Intelligence will win exponentially more fame and fortune. Cancer is one problem. AGI that learns thousands of times faster than humans and solves the world’s toughest challenges is infinitely more valuable, and dangerous. With great power comes great responsibility. I for one am very excited about the possibilities of AI. Today applied AI/ML startups are all the rage. They are poised to make great breakthroughs in business and efficiency around the world. These are not the problem, these simple AI systems are mere math and more like party tricks and pattern matching than true intelligence. But true AI is something else entirely. And it is morally irresponsible to assume it will behave and function with similar goals and logic as humans do. There is a problem here. Whose responsibility is control and monitoring? Companies don’t care. They move fast and break things for massive profit. And there is debate on this subject. But as we move into a world where more and more workers become displayed by AI (not the subject of this article), how can we utilize these people, the resources and abundance created by simple AI and startups today to create an AI defence initiative? It is hard enough to keep hackers out. How much harder is it to perfectly constraint an entity that moves and learns a million times faster than humans with a completely different logic and brain structure — it is arguably impossible, all codes have bugs and accidental backdoors… One small step for man, one giant leap for AI. Some mistakes you cannot undo. There is no control + Z Thoughts? What would you propose? Excited about AI, driverless and future of society and cities? for our live streamed round table 12/11 @ 10am PST. Expert panel includes: — founder X.ai, — Cruise Automation angel investor, — VC @ Urban.us and — AI research, 8x author, founder Pluto.ai. RSVP today via Typeform Dennis R. Mortensen Zach Coelius Shaun Abrahamson Prateek Raj Joshi Register today. Before you go… If you got something actionable or valuable from this post, click the👏 button below and share the article on Facebook and Twitter so your friends can benefit from it too. on thesyndicate.vc. Link to original article

Artificial Intelligence and The End of Everything — The Skynet Debate

Recently I’ve being following the game at Wuzheng about Alpha Go and its game with Kejie, the current world champion in the game of go. This game has a very significant effect on the development of AI for two reasons. One, the game of go has being considered one of the hardest games to solve for AI because it’s near impossible to do with brute force. The number of possible moves in go is magnitudes higher than the number of atoms in the observable universe. The other reason is that since the game with Lee Sedol last year, Alpha Go has improved significantly. It actually teaches itself how to play go (unfortunately there’s no human that can actually teach it anything), and it’s done using one tenth of the computation requirement. For these of you interested, there's   208168199381979984699478633344862770286522453884530548425639456820927419612738015378525648451698519643907259916015628128546089888314427129715319317557736620397247064840935 possible legal moves in a 19 x 19 standard game board. source: http://tromp.github.io/go/legal.html How Alpha Go works is by using deep reinforced learning. ( ) Essentially it sets up multiple nodes that have which either links to a raw input, another node, or the system output. Each node filter the signal it receives and sends it off with some modifications. Through trial and error, it modifies the filter criteria of the value received as well as its modification to the value before passing it on. And it’s very like how our biological neuron functions. If I’m wrong in the following explanation of neural network and machine learning then please let me know. All my knowledge of neural network is from Wikipedia, Waitbutwhy and 2 university lectures on introduction to neural network The human race actually functions similar to a neural network as well. You have celebrities and politicians who have a heavy influence on the direction of society. You have people who don’t have as much of an influence individually but indirectly impact the society as a whole (most people are like this). And you have isolated native tribes who probably isn’t even aware that Earth is round and we have airplanes and probably do not influence the mass society at all. And we pass information to each other through oral and written methods like media, advertisement, blogs and reddit posts. We are actually a pretty terrible neural network in that the information we try to pass on is usually really slow, often lost in translation and most of the time gets lost. One way of improving the efficiency of humanities’ neural network is to improve the method of passing down information. Thus one of the heavy influencers of our society, Elon Musk, recently decides to start a company called Neuralink to speed up and improve our communication. (Once again, everything I know about it is from this ). If we can achieve better information flow, society as a whole will be capable of learning faster and hopefully make better decisions for the entirety of human race. waitbutwhy article Now let’s go back to why Alpha Go is important. Alpha Go, and more broadly intelligence, can solve the awful efficiency of our human neural using a different approach. We can use machines to learn lessons and take them directly, by passing the low-effectiveness of the human neural network. We, humans, are actually terrible learners as well. It takes us many tries to break our habits and years of practice to become good at something. Grandmasters at Go or Chess still takes years of practice to get to where they are. Artificial intelligence however, have a much higher efficiency and can practice millions of times in the span of days! This means AI are much more capable of learning than humans. Any job that require expertise can be replaced by AI in the future. Based on the progress of Alpha Go, I forecast we’ll be able to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), AI that’s capable of learning non-specific tasks, within the next 10 years. By 2027, we might have android that is indistinguishable from humans. They’ll seem like a super smart person to the rest of us. artificial network Expertise is no more than a multiplication of efficiency and practice. So one of the more common concerns for achieving AGI is whether this will cause a robot uprising and slave the human race under a robot overlord like Skynet. My view is that it is very unlikely unless someone tell it to do so. And the reason is that while machine learning algorithms like deep reinforced learning can learn better than humans do, it isn’t capable of handling tasks without a way to judge right and wrong, such as philosophy or morality. This is a human thing to do; we set illogical goals because we like it. So if we don’t tell it to take over the world, it won’t have a reason to. If the AI have a morality fail safe like the the , it wouldn’t take over the world. A society of artificial general intelligence wouldn’t attempt to fly to the moon even if they could, because there is no point of doing so. feel three laws of robotics However, there’s another danger that I’m more worried about when it comes to AGI (beside the danger of it falling into the wrong hands), is that artificial intelligence lacks wisdom. The definition of wisdom used here is learning over a period of long time. We humans grow more wise, both as an individual and as an race, over time. It took us decades to even centuries to realize the effect of global warming, or the health effects of DDT, because they lack short term effects. The good news is, by the time we noticed, it was still a fixable problem. However that’s not quite true with AIs, they move so fast that by the time it realizes that something is wrong, it might already be too late. By the time the AIs notice the heat death of the universe is speeding up, they might have already sucked away hundreds of thousands galaxies worth of energy. is how hackers start their afternoons. We’re a part of the family. We are now and happy to opportunities. Hacker Noon @AMI accepting submissions discuss advertising & sponsorship To learn more, , , or simply, read our about page like/message us on Facebook tweet/DM @HackerNoon. If you enjoyed this story, we recommend reading our and . Until next time, don’t take the realities of the world for granted! latest tech stories trending tech stories

From Alpha Go to Neural Network to Future of Artificial Intelligence and real life Skynet

Interview With Cosmas Wong: Don’t Fear Skynet, Libra Catapulted Crypto Awareness in Masses

Learning how to use AI tools using plots and examples from science fiction movies. 77% of people fear they could lose their jobs to artificial intelligence in the next 12 months. These are the results of a July 2023 study published by Forbes. It is a great demonstration of people's propensity for irrational fears. Particularly, when people have been scared for a long time with stories about Skynet, TechnoCore, and similar soulless, but invariably bloodthirsty, AI. In reality, there are no streams of ex-employees leaving their offices with boxes of personal belongings in their hands. Among our colleagues, acquaintances, and clients, there is not a single person who has fired an employee or lost his or her job because artificial intelligence has replaced them. On the contrary, there is a consistent shortage of qualified personnel. This includes those who are able to effectively search for and use various AI applications in their work. There is a very real, factual problem that we want to dedicate this article to. While working on our Pitch Avatar, we have more than once encountered complaints about the difficulties of working with AI tools. To summarize, they boil down to the fact that many users have found their expectations of AI to be unrealistic. "I thought it would be smarter," one of our acquaintances irritatedly remarked, sharing his experience with one popular AI chatbot that he used as a text generator and editor. And he is, to repeat, not alone. Notorious "hallucinations", errors, and multiple repetitions or banalities are only part of the problem. Much worse is the fact that people often fail to find a "common language" with AI. The application, which purports to be trained to perceive natural speech, nevertheless struggles to understand what users want from it, interpreting its requests in its own way time after time. In turn, the human user is repeatedly frustrated in their attempts to tell the AI what it wants... Have you experienced any of the above? If so, then welcome aboard. In search of answers and solutions to these problems, we embark on a journey through the plots of sci-fi movies. The Brute Force Method To begin with, while seemingly similar, AI-based tools, even those designed to accomplish the same goals, are still different. You shouldn't conclude that AI can't handle your tasks based on one or two solutions. Even if they all look the same to you. Try to act like Detective Del Spooner from Alex Proyas' movie I, Robot. He believed in the existence of a unique robot among serial models, persistently searched for it, and managed to find it. Moreover, in the end, this robot turned out to be the tool that helped the detective to fulfill a supremely difficult task - to defeat an out-of-control artificial intelligence, V.I.K.I. So be persistent. If you must - explore the myriad possibilities and try dozens, if necessary, of different AI tools in your work. Almost certainly you will find one to your liking. Exclusion Method Imagine that you have formulated a task for your AI (for example, to find some article or create some content), and it "mined" or generated something that technically meets your request, but is not what you wanted. At the same time, for various reasons, you can't clarify your query or reformulate it. This may be because you lack sufficient information. What to do? Skynet and the Terminator in James Cameron's movie were in the same situation. Remember, they didn't know exactly which Sarah Connor from Los Angeles they wanted. So the Terminator decided to "visit" all the Sarah Connors in Los Angeles by simply moving through all of the Sarah Connors listed in the phone book. Makes sense, doesn't it? This is not a bad solution in situations where the AI responding to your query is not giving you the result you want. If you have time, you can simply be patient and methodically repeat your query, specifying that the previous results are not suitable. Sooner or later, the AI will hit the target. A Method of Checking for Complexity and Contradictions Anyone who has worked with AI has encountered the proverbial machine hallucinations and delusions. This includes all of those situations where text generators write incoherent nonsense, AI analytics show calendar data from a century ago, universal AI assistants create empty references and invent quotes from non-existent people, and image generators offer a maze of disfigured people, skewed buildings, and insane landscapes. However, before you rage at your AI assistants, consider why this is happening. Let's reveal a terrible secret: Artificial intelligence isn't trying to piss you off. It's trying to please you by producing the most satisfying result possible. But all AI is limited in terms of resources, time, and skill. That is why AI always tries to follow the path of least resistance. And if a task exceeds its capabilities for one reason or another, it starts to "rave", simplifying the task to a level that allows it to fit into the Procrustean bed of its skills and resources. Think of the classic example from Stanley Kubrick's movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, made in 1968. In it, HAL 9000, a very smart AI that is installed in a spaceship was given a task that contradicted its basic programming. As a result, it "went mad" and decided to eliminate the contradiction by destroying the crew... When faced with signs of "madness" in your AI tools, think about whether your task is ambiguous or contradictory. Can it be formulated more clearly, specifically, and as a result, more simply? Keep in mind - "simpler" does not always mean "shorter". Sometimes, in order to make the task unambiguous, you have to spend not less, but more words for clarification. A Method for Identifying Major and Minor Another common problem is that AI focuses on secondary tasks rather than primary ones. Let's say you need a text about otters living in a lake. And you instruct the AI writer to generate it. But as a result, it produces a narrative 90% is dedicated to the lake itself and only 10% to otters. And the story about the lake, in its turn, is full of details that have nothing to do with nature at all. For example, human settlements located on its shores and their history. Something similar is demonstrated by such movie characters as the protocol robot C3PO from the epic Star Wars or the android Data from the Star Trek: The Next Generation series. They would, occasionally, start sharing information not directly related to the solution for which they had been approached. Other characters were often forced to either clarify the task at hand or simply interrupt the stream of consciousness from the AI. From these examples, it is clear that when formulating tasks for AI, one should clearly prioritize them. A good example is the straightforward order given to the android Ash in Ridley Scott's movie, Alien. Ash was tasked with ensuring the delivery of an alien organism to Earth. It was explicitly specified that the survival of the crew of the ship Nostromo, which included him, could be neglected. Though Ash himself even admitted to sympathizing with the humans he served with, orders were orders and he followed them diligently. Human-AI System, or the Inevitable "42" It is time for the main conclusions of this text. Let's ask ourselves - why, for all their logic, did Skynet and Terminator, HAL 9000 and Ash, and many other movie-villain AIs fail? It goes without saying that "Because the script said so" is not an acceptable answer. The correct answer is because all of these AIs opposed humans, rather than cooperating with them. And this is the point of any artificial intelligence’s basic philosophy. It is not designed to work independently but rather to interact with humans. If you will, any artificial intelligence is a part of a "Human-AI" system. Outside of this system, it is incomplete. For AI to work effectively, it will always need people to give it tasks, as well as to edit, correct, and refine the results of its work. As a consequence, as we develop artificial intelligence we will constantly need to develop our skills in working with it. AI mistakes are inevitable because they are inevitable in humans. It is important to keep in mind that AI is learning and developing. And, as we know, it is impossible to travel this path without mistakes and failures. That's why we should always be ready to hear this answer from AI: "42" The article was created in collaboration with Andriy Tkachenko. Feature (C) Image created with Bing Learning how to use AI tools using plots and examples from science fiction movies. Learning how to use AI tools using plots and examples from science fiction movies. 77% of people fear they could lose their jobs to artificial intelligence in the next 12 months. These are the results of a July 2023 study published by Forbes . It is a great demonstration of people's propensity for irrational fears. Particularly, when people have been scared for a long time with stories about Skynet, TechnoCore, and similar soulless, but invariably bloodthirsty, AI. published by Forbes published by Forbes In reality, there are no streams of ex-employees leaving their offices with boxes of personal belongings in their hands. Among our colleagues, acquaintances, and clients, there is not a single person who has fired an employee or lost his or her job because artificial intelligence has replaced them. On the contrary, there is a consistent shortage of qualified personnel. This includes those who are able to effectively search for and use various AI applications in their work. There is a very real, factual problem that we want to dedicate this article to. While working on our Pitch Avatar , we have more than once encountered complaints about the difficulties of working with AI tools. To summarize, they boil down to the fact that many users have found their expectations of AI to be unrealistic. Pitch Avatar Pitch Avatar "I thought it would be smarter," one of our acquaintances irritatedly remarked, sharing his experience with one popular AI chatbot that he used as a text generator and editor. And he is, to repeat, not alone. Notorious "hallucinations", errors, and multiple repetitions or banalities are only part of the problem. Much worse is the fact that people often fail to find a "common language" with AI. The application, which purports to be trained to perceive natural speech, nevertheless struggles to understand what users want from it, interpreting its requests in its own way time after time. In turn, the human user is repeatedly frustrated in their attempts to tell the AI what it wants... Have you experienced any of the above? If so, then welcome aboard. In search of answers and solutions to these problems, we embark on a journey through the plots of sci-fi movies. The Brute Force Method To begin with, while seemingly similar, AI-based tools, even those designed to accomplish the same goals, are still different. You shouldn't conclude that AI can't handle your tasks based on one or two solutions. Even if they all look the same to you. Try to act like Detective Del Spooner from Alex Proyas' movie I, Robot. He believed in the existence of a unique robot among serial models, persistently searched for it, and managed to find it. Moreover, in the end, this robot turned out to be the tool that helped the detective to fulfill a supremely difficult task - to defeat an out-of-control artificial intelligence, V.I.K.I. So be persistent. If you must - explore the myriad possibilities and try dozens, if necessary, of different AI tools in your work. Almost certainly you will find one to your liking. Exclusion Method Imagine that you have formulated a task for your AI (for example, to find some article or create some content), and it "mined" or generated something that technically meets your request, but is not what you wanted. At the same time, for various reasons, you can't clarify your query or reformulate it. This may be because you lack sufficient information. What to do? Skynet and the Terminator in James Cameron's movie were in the same situation. Remember, they didn't know exactly which Sarah Connor from Los Angeles they wanted. So the Terminator decided to "visit" all the Sarah Connors in Los Angeles by simply moving through all of the Sarah Connors listed in the phone book. Makes sense, doesn't it? This is not a bad solution in situations where the AI responding to your query is not giving you the result you want. If you have time, you can simply be patient and methodically repeat your query, specifying that the previous results are not suitable. Sooner or later, the AI will hit the target. A Method of Checking for Complexity and Contradictions Anyone who has worked with AI has encountered the proverbial machine hallucinations and delusions. This includes all of those situations where text generators write incoherent nonsense, AI analytics show calendar data from a century ago, universal AI assistants create empty references and invent quotes from non-existent people, and image generators offer a maze of disfigured people, skewed buildings, and insane landscapes. However, before you rage at your AI assistants, consider why this is happening. Let's reveal a terrible secret: Artificial intelligence isn't trying to piss you off. It's trying to please you by producing the most satisfying result possible. But all AI is limited in terms of resources, time, and skill. That is why AI always tries to follow the path of least resistance. And if a task exceeds its capabilities for one reason or another, it starts to "rave", simplifying the task to a level that allows it to fit into the Procrustean bed of its skills and resources. Think of the classic example from Stanley Kubrick's movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, made in 1968. In it, HAL 9000, a very smart AI that is installed in a spaceship was given a task that contradicted its basic programming. As a result, it "went mad" and decided to eliminate the contradiction by destroying the crew... When faced with signs of "madness" in your AI tools, think about whether your task is ambiguous or contradictory. Can it be formulated more clearly, specifically, and as a result, more simply? Keep in mind - "simpler" does not always mean "shorter". Sometimes, in order to make the task unambiguous, you have to spend not less, but more words for clarification. A Method for Identifying Major and Minor Another common problem is that AI focuses on secondary tasks rather than primary ones. Let's say you need a text about otters living in a lake. And you instruct the AI writer to generate it. But as a result, it produces a narrative 90% is dedicated to the lake itself and only 10% to otters. And the story about the lake, in its turn, is full of details that have nothing to do with nature at all. For example, human settlements located on its shores and their history. Something similar is demonstrated by such movie characters as the protocol robot C3PO from the epic Star Wars or the android Data from the Star Trek: The Next Generation series. They would, occasionally, start sharing information not directly related to the solution for which they had been approached. Other characters were often forced to either clarify the task at hand or simply interrupt the stream of consciousness from the AI. From these examples, it is clear that when formulating tasks for AI, one should clearly prioritize them. A good example is the straightforward order given to the android Ash in Ridley Scott's movie, Alien. Ash was tasked with ensuring the delivery of an alien organism to Earth. It was explicitly specified that the survival of the crew of the ship Nostromo, which included him, could be neglected. Though Ash himself even admitted to sympathizing with the humans he served with, orders were orders and he followed them diligently. Human-AI System, or the Inevitable "42" It is time for the main conclusions of this text. Let's ask ourselves - why, for all their logic, did Skynet and Terminator, HAL 9000 and Ash, and many other movie-villain AIs fail? It goes without saying that "Because the script said so" is not an acceptable answer. The correct answer is because all of these AIs opposed humans, rather than cooperating with them. And this is the point of any artificial intelligence’s basic philosophy. It is not designed to work independently but rather to interact with humans. If you will, any artificial intelligence is a part of a "Human-AI" system. Outside of this system, it is incomplete. For AI to work effectively, it will always need people to give it tasks, as well as to edit, correct, and refine the results of its work. As a consequence, as we develop artificial intelligence we will constantly need to develop our skills in working with it. AI mistakes are inevitable because they are inevitable in humans. It is important to keep in mind that AI is learning and developing. And, as we know, it is impossible to travel this path without mistakes and failures. That's why we should always be ready to hear this answer from AI: "42" The article was created in collaboration with Andriy Tkachenko. The article was created in collaboration with Andriy Tkachenko. Feature (C) Image created with Bing Feature (C) Image created with Bing

A Cinematic Tutorial on How to Work With Artificial Intelligence

Bitcoin is literally the most energetic digital computational system on the planet. While its energy is used in mining operations, is there any chance of it being channelled towards more noble goals than Bitcoin, when the need arises? I believe so. Part 1: Nukes Alfred Nobel would be proud a) The long term First, let us explore the long term. Assume a terrible nuclear event is headed our way 5 years from now. Then it means we have up to 5 years to stop an escalation leading to Armageddon. It means finding ways to be ever more diplomatic. Currently, one of the biggest contentions between the United States of America and the Russian Federation is the fact that the USA can bully Russia by denying it access to dollar markets. The US dollar is still global reserve currency, which means trade agreements between Russia and US dollar-holding countries can become way more difficult. If anything could lead to somebody firing a nuke between these two, this is one of those things. Especially if even as the USA keeps expanding its debt, it still gets more and more allies willing to absorb its dollar inflation for the greater good of a cooperative alliance with NATO. How Bitcoin fixes this is quite straightforward – Bitcoin becomes the global reserve currency. This will level the playing field, to make the USA have to play by offering quality products in place of threats, while the Russians also offer quality products in place of counter threats. A global reserve currency owned by nobody, which everybody and every organization has some power and influence over, is the best currency for such fraught times as ours. b) The immediate term Alright. Assume instead that the weapon has been fired. We have only 30 minutes on the clock to stop it, otherwise the shall be manifested. Whoever gets hit between the two, Russia will likely blame the USA and the USA will likely blame Russia. The second nuke will start a chain reaction. We need to stop the end of human civilization at the first nuke. sum of all our fears As I write this, there is from carrying out its grim job. it is too damn fast, space is too damn big, so most attempts flat-out fail to hit the thing. no known way to stop an ICBM nuke Okay, how about hacking it. Can we hack a nuke mid-fight and disable it? The short answer is – YES, because nukes today use digital systems, . some of which are online The real answer is – I don’t know, and are not sure I will find the answer via Google. This stuff is classified. The best I can do is cook something up. First, by leveraging the Earth’s , I suffice humans could find a way to target a nuclear missile with a lightning bolt from the ionosphere either the first time (while ascending) or the second time (while descending) across the ionosphere. Schuman Resonances Like Zeus. How we could possibly do that would be by tracking it (the nuke) using all our computational resources, including Bitcoin computational resources, then launching a coordinated strike using the electrical power from our (now decoupled) Bitcoin miners. For Bitcoin, this could be accomplished with a fictional Bitcoin Improvement Protocol I will hereby call – BIP 911. BIP 911 could be suggested and unanimously passed by the Bitcoin community. I suffice designing it so that when the majority of people send their coins to a special wallet address, the Bitcoin blockchain will; Accept to turn the computational power of ASIC miners towards hacking a nuke mid-flight. Execute this idea in under 10 minutes the same way we look for bitcoins in 10 minutes. Bitcoin’s synchronized nodes world-over make it a good tracker of any signals that need to be tracked, while routing this information all over the world to all other nodes. All that hashing power should be able to stop a nuke. Seriously. Part 2: Rogue AGI Intelligence is not enough. Cooperative human endeavors are so much more. a) The long term It feels like every smart person is trying to build an artificial intelligence or some machine learning system. Which makes sense. Underlying targeted advertising, the biggest online business model on earth, is machine learning algorithms that track and make great inferences of consumer behaviour. But there is also some common sense to it. People eat lunch at lunchtime, investors hurry to sell their holdings on Friday to go enjoy the weekend (so the price dips) and scramble to buy back on Monday (so the price climbs), and cats will always have pointy ears, furry fur and that cute face with the big yellow eyes. So every well-designed AI will learn of this. It is how it is. There are those who fear, however, that AIs today might be getting too much power. I would agree especially if you put these systems in charge of crucial social systems like our finances (by making them trade all over Wall Street), or if you put these AIs in every home so that they start dicing and splicing our cabbages for us, cleaning our toilets and maybe even bathing us. Like, human beings will degenerate. That is for sure. They will likely even forget how to build good AIs. Which will be a disaster. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lhmKOR8Www&embedable=true So in the long term, I hope humanity finds a reason to NOT give AI development all those $10 trillion Altman dollars. I hope Bitcoin, as it heads towards global reserve currency status, eats away at least half that cash investment. GPUs for AI are all good and NVIDIA is in business. But I think more Bitcoin ASICs is what we want to build more of. I am more comfortable heating the planet with Bitcoin ASICs than with NVIDIA GPUs. With the former, people have a say and can act as individuals using their private keys. With the latter, Sam Altman or other AI experts have all the say. But I believe his words have a much smaller impact than those of millions of people. I mean, it is mathematics. 1,000,000 is bigger than 1. c) The Short term Let’s assume we wake up, turn on our smartphones, and SkyNet is addressing the planet. Telling us how gullible we have been and that this is our end. Let’s say our final prayers. Well, this is like shooting a nuke. Nukes. Obviously, SkyNet will try to hack all our nuclear weapons and rain them down on us. That’s the fastest way to end us. For some reason, I feel like this might unite us way more than if a nuclear weapon was headed anyone’s way thanks to a conflict between two countries. Like, I feel everybody with software skills will pull out their laptop and try to stop SkyNet. I may be wrong. Some people say they hate people. Like with a nuke, BIP 911 may be our designated saving grace. But also, a more direct approach could be to shut down the internet. Choke that Rogue AGI out. It cannot hide inside Bitcoin nodes (they only have leftover space for short text and meme JPEGs) so the world will be alright. Maybe better off after all is said and done. Yup, we shall be back to a command-line existence. And whoever actually knows how to speak arcane computer speak from the 1990s will be made President of their country. Hackernoon already looks the part. What an adventure. Part 3: A Climate Catastrophe The Earth’s climate cannot be tamed. It is the wildest of all creatures. Mother of universal terrors such as lightning, floods and drought. Human beings are powerful creatures. The Holy Bible calls them the apex creation. They have tamed lions, hunger, and their base desires to pillage and destroy. But they are yet to tame Climate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwP5zVP2bgU&embedable=true The issue with the climate is how its wildness is directly proportional to how much energy we pump into the planetary ecosystem. But how can we help it. We are 8 billion of us. We all need food, water, shelter, clothes, smartphones, laptops, toothpaste, stainless steel cutlery, plastic holders for everything, cars, planes, a good life. Alas, the price of pumping energy through all these drives more carbon into the atmosphere and more energy into this carbon. Henceforth, we are stirring up bigger hurricanes, bigger ice-storms, bigger droughts. Bigger and bigger. We are going for the big leagues. We better be ready. a) The short term On the short term, I believe we need to find a way to consume things that can sort of tune the climate. Bitcoin miners can be switched on and off, so this is one thing. Same with TVs, cars, planes, etc. Fiat money, which I think is mostly humbug (how can one person be allowed to control the money supply, hence wealth, of billions of people? Isn’t that ridiculous?), is another way to go when heat waves start. Coupled with Bitcoin as Global Reserve Currency, don’t forget. It saddens me to say this. But I follow the logical inference wherever it points. Even if it points towards hell. If my logic is wrong, do tell me how. To survive a climate catastrophe, we might need to classify climate as Enemy Number 1 world over. Forget your puny AIs generating realistic cat videos. Forget your puny contests over who has the biggest nuclear stockpiles. Let’s go to war against the climate, and win. Of course, the commanders will be allowed to use fiat to, well, direct us. Money does the talking these days. BUT when the commands start making no sense, like “cutting back”, then you know this is all silly. Switch the BTC node miners back on. Switch on the AIs, TV, Radio, everything. “Cut back” is a stupid command. “Let’s go!”, now that’s what I’m talking about. We are the apex species. We don’t win by going back to a cave, to cower from the big bad monster. b) The hopefully very Long term We win by finding a way to tolerate and overcome droughts, floods, hurricanes, heat waves and ice ages. Fiat debt money, instead of being given freely to anybody above 18 and so on, should be channeled towards building something as magnificent as the Egyptian Pyramids were magnificent in 5000 BCE. Some big fat climate control contraption. Some grand scheme we, and our grandchildren, can all be proud of. If it backfires, at least we shall have tried. It will have been a glorious battle against the climate monster. Otherwise, sweeping it under the carpet while we whine and cause troubles about race, sex, immigration, is a disgrace to our tiger-fighting, disease-demon exorcising ancestors. To reiterate. Today, we are not fighting climate change. We are making grand speeches and expecting other people, except us, to do all the dirty work. Fighting monsters is a dirty work. Alas, we are TV-grown and Smartphone-grown children. But where there is a global will, there is a way. There is strength hidden from our sights. In the long run, Bitcoin is the only technology that, with its keys, has attached value to individuals because if the individual does not provide the key to the money, nobody on earth, not even POTUS, can open the wallet. It’s that simple. While in fiat world, if you do not provide the key the bank can override your ego, here, if Satoshi Nakamoto is not found and his 2 million bitcoins balloon to a collective value of $2 trillion-plus, nobody and no organization will be able to tap this $2 trillion. This is how powerful this is. Each human mind, thanks to a secret key, finally elevated to be canonical in financial decision-making. If in the far future Bitcoin evolves into technology spanning the entire solar system, then having a secret key is the equivalent to having a say over the forces that shall move mountains on planets. The power to change climates even. To terraform worlds. Like the Bible mentions. All because Bitcoin respects the individual. Because Bitcoins makes the individual more worthy. Not because the individual is super smart, has unique blood or a royal ancestry. Simply because they have this piece of text they know, and nobody else knows it, and it is important. That is all. I know, humanity is still waiting for that push, and it will come. ETFs are a great first step and soon, more governments will be getting on board, then the UN. The threat of catastrophic climate change just might become extinct. Swept not under any rags, but into the past.

Can Bitcoin stop Nukes, Rogue AGI and a Climate Catastrophe?

Shaping the Future: Entangle's Partnership with Consensys for Web3 Evolution Entangle, a pioneering provider of Web3 infrastructure, has recently made headlines with the announcement of a strategic investment from Consensys. This substantial investment marks a significant milestone for Entangle. This pushes its total funding to an impressive $4 million. Consensys is a well-known blockchain incubator. Entangle announced earlier this year that it had closed a round of private funding. Leading venture capital companies, such as Big Brain Holdings, Launch Code Capital, Seier Capital, and Skynet Capital, have put a lot of money into this round. At the beginning of this year, Entangle said that the company had successfully completed a private fundraising financing round. Big Brain Holdings, Launch Code Capital, Seier Capital, and Skynet Capital are among the prominent venture capital companies that have contributed significant investments to this round of funding. The recent infusion of funds to Entangle from Consensys is set to accelerate Entangle's efforts toward building its interoperable omnichain messaging and liquidity infrastructure. This momentum is being built upon by the recent injection of capital. The Significance of Web3 Infrastructure: Shaping the Future of Decentralized Digital Ecosystems For the purpose of democratising access to online resources, encouraging decentralisation, and fundamentally altering the digital environment, Web3 infrastructure is of utmost importance. Blockchain technology, on the other hand, served as the foundation for Web3, which provides enhanced security, transparency, and autonomy. Due to the fact that it is decentralised, there is a much reduced likelihood of censorship and manipulation. Also, the confidentiality of the data is preserved. Smart contracts, decentralised applications (dApps), and peer-to-peer transactions are further features that are offered by the Web3 architecture. Industry areas such as supply chain management, gambling, and finance are seeing transformations as a result of this. Through the reduction of reliance on intermediaries, Web3 promotes inclusiveness and eliminates barriers that prevent worldwide participation in the digital economy. People are given more control, trust is built, and the foundation is laid for a more equitable and resilient internet ecosystem: these are the reasons why it is vital. It is essential to make investments in Web3 infrastructure in order to provide a society that is fair, safe, and secure in light of the fact that society is becoming more reliant on digital interactions. What Is Entangle The Web3 framework is very important for making online tools more accessible to everyone, encouraging decentralisation, and changing the digital world. Web3, on the other hand, is built on blockchain technology and offers better protection, honesty, and freedom. It is less likely to be censored or hacked because it is decentralised. The privacy of the info is also protected. Web3 design also supports peer-to-peer trades, smart contracts, and decentralised apps (dApps). Some of the areas this is changing are supply chain management, games, and banks. By reducing the need for middlemen, Web3 encourages inclusion and gets rid of barriers to global involvement in the digital economy. It's important because it gives people power, builds trust, and lays the groundwork for a more fair and strong internet environment. As people rely more and more on digital exchanges, we need to put money into Web3 infrastructure to make sure that society is fair, safe, and private. For example, in supply chain management, Web3 technology can track products from creation to delivery without the need for a central authority, ensuring transparency and authenticity. In the gaming industry, blockchain-based dApps allow players to truly own in-game assets and trade them securely without the risk of fraud or hacking. Boosting DApps and Developers Liquid Vaults, Photon Messaging, and Universal Data Feeds are the main things that Entangle makes. People think that these items will be very important in the next round of Web3 innovations. These solutions make it easier for developers to make apps that work with each other by letting different groups work together without any problems. With the creation of Composable Derivatives Tokens (CDTs) and Liquid Vaults in particular, it is now possible to greatly increase liquidity and make new DeFi tactics possible. The Entangle community is getting more and more excited about the April start of the Entangle mainnet. The Entangle testnet was a huge success, with over 1.5 million trades and 250,000 users. This shows that the project has a strong infrastructure and a lot of support. With the start date getting closer, both developers and fans are excited to see how Entangle's Web3 solutions will change things. For example, a user could leverage CDTs and Liquid Vaults to create a decentralized lending platform that allows for instant and seamless borrowing and lending of various digital assets. This would not only increase liquidity in the DeFi space but also open up new opportunities for users to earn passive income through interest payments. Expanding Reach and Impact Entangle has a large network of relationships and connections that show how much it wants to promote openness. It has been stated so far that it will work with more than 42 dApps and have over 75 relationships across 16 blockchains. Now that these relationships are in place, Entangle is ready to keep its promise to provide omnichain data that goes beyond standard limits. Entangle has an effect on many environments, businesses, and networks because it has such a wide reach. Don’t forget to like and share the story! This author is an independent contributor publishing via our brand-as-author program. Be it through direct compensation, media partnerships, or networking, the author has a vested interest in the company/ies mentioned in this story. HackerNoon has reviewed the report for quality, but the claims herein belong to the author. #DYOR Vested Interest Disclosure:

Revolutionizing Web3: How Entangle's Partnership with Consensys Unlocks New Frontiers

280 Stories To Learn About Future Of Ai

Let's learn about via these 50 free stories. They are ordered by most time reading created on HackerNoon. Visit the to find the most read stories about any technology. Libra /Learn Repo 1. Is this the best time to buy Bitcoin or not? The recent rally has affected many market participants; at such moments, many people are influenced by the FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) effect. But an understanding crypto investor, clearly aware that it's just only beginning. 2. Libra Investment Token: Crazy ROI The main focus on Libra so far was the stablecoin - a digital currency pegged to a basket of underlying assets. If the pegging mechanism works as intended, Libra coin won't undergo any crazy crypto pumps & dumps. Holders of Libra coin probably won't face any bigger risk than holding cash. This of course also means they won't make any money on the coin. 3. Facebook's Libra Means the Death of Privacy Picture a dystopian society. What do you see? Are you imagining a world with the aesthetic of Blade Runner 2077 or a similarly Cyberpunk-esque environment? 4. Libra (or the Announced Failure of a Pseudo-cryptocurrency) With Paypal withdrawn and Visa and Mastercard soon to follow suit, the death knell has sounded for Facebook’s cryptocurrency, Libra. Here’s an analysis of what happened in just 4 months. 5. Is Facebook Putting Digital Identity At Risk With Libra? Here’s Why It Raises Privacy Concerns Last month, Facebook finally disclosed details of its much-hyped cryptocurrency, Libra. After generating an immense amount of chatter, the company announced that the digital currency, set to launch in 2020, will enable people to buy things or send money to others with almost zero fees. 6. Some Insights into Facebook's Libra Consensus Method and How it Compares to other BFTs While there has been plenty of talk about the regulatory and privacy implications, there has been little public dialogue about the technology behind Facebook’s new digital currency. Can regulators concerns about privacy be alleviated upon closer inspection of Facebook’s new digital currency? 7. How Facebook Stablecoin Libra Could Replace all Current Stablecoins Facebook recently announced their new Libra cryptocurrency, a stablecoin set to launch in 2020 which will initially let users transfer money between Facebook’s Messenger and WhatsApp applications. However, the larger goal of Libra is to transform the global economy. In conjunction with other companies and partners that make up the Libra Association, including payments companies, technology companies, marketplaces, and venture capitalist firms, Libra has the potential to do just that. Having been involved in the cryptocurrency industry for the last couple of years there is definitely a reason to doubt how decentralized Libra truly is and if it can even be considered a cryptocurrency. However, one thing is certain, given the proposed makeup of Libra it could ultimately replace all current stablecoins, and quickly. 8. What Makes Facebook’s Libra More Centralized? 9. The Facebook Fake-Waves of Libra Scams. There’s a new wave of dozen fake accounts, groups and pages which are spread across Facebook and Instagram. — Claiming and trying to sell Facebook’s latest cryptocurrency Libra everywhere across the social platforms. 10. Did Libra announcement impact the price of BTC? Last week, the price of BTC rose extensively, jumping to almost 13k. It was perfect timing for the organizers of the BTC2019 conference in San Francisco. 11. Finally Congress grasps crypto Occasionally an investigation turns up a piece of evidence that is unexpected, and is in fact more valuable that the information that is actually being sought. It could be said that last week’s Congressional hearings into Facebook’s Libra did just that. 12. How The Hotstuff Protocol is NOT Secure? Each participant stores a tree of pending commands locally, in addition to the state variables viewNumber (starting at 1, stores the highest QC it voted to pre-commit), and prepareQC (starts at nil), lockedQC (starts at nil, stores the highest QC it voted to commit). When a “new-view” or round starts, a public function determines the leader from the current participants. 13. Accounting & regulations for businesses that integrate Libra The lack of transparency has been a growing problem for crypto-based companies. For most of them, it is a nightmare just to meet basic regulatory needs like finding an accountant, opening a bank account, getting audited and certified compliant. The main challenge lies in the fact that most accounting practices and financial reporting guidelines are formulated for traditional FIAT currency based businesses. There is a lack of clearly defined standards and practices for businesses dealing in tokens and cryptocurrencies. 14. Chain reaction: What will the next decade of blockchain look like? For a mechanical entity that nobody was aware of just three years ago, blockchain has certainly come a long way. Bitcoin’s rise in popularity turned the blockchain technology that drives it firmly into the limelight, but what does the future hold for this brave new world? 15. Is Facebook's Libra Even a Cryptocurrency? When Facebook first publicised its plans to launch a new 'decentralised' digital currency in 2019, Libra, many people were surprised at the news. Few months after Libra's announcement, Facebook released its official whitepaper to the general populace, and eyebrows were raised. 16. Business Model Innovation And The Future Of Crypto In his essay, Fred Wilson wrote in AVC blog about technical innovation, business model innovation, and the last two big waves we had in the tech industry: 17. Digital Euro (CBDCs): Closer To Reality Than You Think The ECB (European Central Bank) has published a report stating
the digital euro is getting closer to be launched. It gives an overview of a
possible roadmap for implementing the digital euro as well as the advantages and disadvantages of a digital currency in the euro zone. 18. Facebook’s Libra Currency ‘Big Tech’ are coming for our banks, but should we be worried? 19. Olaf Scholz vs. Facebook's Libra Vice-chancellor and Germany's finance minister, Olaf Scholz, says ‘No’ to Facebook, ‘Yes!” to digital currency. 20. Why The Death of Libra May be a Good Thing For The Crypto Landscape Facebook’s Libra project had promised to spark a global financial revolution that would bring unprecedented inclusivity and borderless banking. Within months, Mark Zuckerberg’s stablecoin dream was in tatters. But the death of Libra may turn out to be a positive thing for the crypto landscape. 21. This Decade, The Masses Will Not Be Able to Avoid Digital Currencies Over the past decade, cryptocurrency has become a term that everyone recognizes. Whether it registers as some far-out concept that has something to do with invisible money, or whether you are a crypto geek who belongs to exchange platforms and follows various currencies religiously. 22. Cryptocurrencies as Money: Evolution of Stablecoins and What's Next Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies that are backed by other assets to achieve a stable value, which creates untold opportunity for the way humans interact with money as they have the benefits of cryptocurrency (borderless, secure, low cost) while protecting the users from volatile price action. They often represent real money (GBP, USD etc) and for this reason are more easily understood by a global audience. 23. How to Build a Stablecoin To Compete with Libra In my Libra project analysis report ( A Business Analysis of the Libra Project), I pointed out that there is still a very good opportunity to develop a new stablecoin that competes with Libra. The Libra project is definitely not the end of the stablecoin project, but a milestone in this process. More stablecoin projects will appear to provide more stablecoin products for the market. In terms of the mechanism for generating stablecoins, other stablecoin products can be substantially different from Libra. In terms of application scenarios of stablecoin, a more suitable application scenario can also be adopted. In view of the fact that stablecoin is still at a very early stage and all the risks of the Libra project, other stablecoin products still have a very high probability of success. As long as the correct strategy is adopted in the design of stablecoin, promotion organization and adoption scenario, it is very likely that the new stablecoin can be better accepted by the market. This article discusses some of the factors related to the new stablecoin. [24. Making Good Money: The Coming Synthetic Hegemonic Currency](https://hackernoon.com/making-good-money-the-coming-synthetic-hegemonic-currency-yff4v32xw) Caption: James Gillray, The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, 22 May 1797, public domain, courtesy of the Bank of England 25. LIBRA- Decoding Facebook Cryptocurrency In 7 Questions The American giant must present Tuesday its cryptocurrency project. While waiting for its launch scheduled for 2020, the future “libra”, conceived in partnership with 27 groups, raises many questions: how can we buy them? How will it work? Who to regulate it? 26. Wake Up and Smell These #TopTechStories 🍏 27. How Libra Changed the Design and Expectations for Other Digital Currencies What should digital currency operators consider before creating one ? 28. Interview With Cosmas Wong: Don’t Fear Skynet, Libra Catapulted Crypto Awareness in Masses Cosmas Wong is a tech entrepreneur and investor who created companies for more than 20 years. He is the founder of Grey Jean Technologies; the genesis of the GNY platform, and also of other strong technology companies. I had the opportunity to make that interview with him, and we discussed the problems of AI, blockchain, and crypto adoption as well as his business ideas. 29. 10 Data-Driven Predictions for Bitcoin, Stocks, and Commodities in 2020 It's a brand-new year, and oh man, 2020 has a lot on its plate. Last year, we witnessed the benchmark S&P 500 surge almost 29%, crude oil rallied 35% and the bitcoin price nearly doubled since the beginning of the year. [30. Facebook & the Libra Effect: The New Importance of Privacy in Online Marketplaces](https://hackernoon.com/facebook-and-the-libra-effect-the-new-importance-of-privacy-in-online-marketplaces-esfj3y5p) Members of the Libra Association, a group of 28 companies and not-for-profit groups including and brought together by Facebook may soon have the power to forever change the history of the online marketplace worldwide. The Senate and House hearings in Washington July 18th and 19th - as theatrical as they were - may still only be a subtle indication of the grand ramifications of a marketplace where privacy does not exist for buyers and sellers. 31. Libra is The Offshore Oil Rig of Data Collection. Drill Baby Drill. Libra Is Not A Gateway Cryptocurrency 32. Libra untangled: what lies behind facebook's digital currency project - PART I Libra - Facebook´s digital currency project - has been a very populartalk lately. Even US President Trump tweeted about it. But few have looked at what may be the hidden implicationsof Facebook´s project. 33. Libra Starts the End of Public Chains In my previous article (So Many Public Chains, So Few Dapps), I pointed it out that too many public chains was one of the reasons that there were so few Dapps. App developers really do not want to develop their apps for so many blockchains. 34. What I learned from Ethereum Devcon5 The Ethereum Foundation Devcon is the most important annual gathering of developers, designers, and researchers in the Ethereum ecosystem. This year’s Devcon5 in Osaka, Japan is the 5th Devcon, and as in past years, it is a bellwether of what to come in Ethereum. 35. Is Libra a Paper Tiger? Of course, Libra is not a paper tiger. Otherwise it won’t cause theimmediate concern of global financial regulatory bodies and central banks, as well as the hearings by United States congress. But, this project indeed has inherent risks which make it very vulnerable. There is a good chance that it may get seriously delayed or may be forced to shut down if it cannot deal with these risks appropriately. If, unfortunately, it is forced to stop, then its short period of existence is then really a paper tiger. 36. Libra: The Ideavirus The lid on the fabled "Facebook coin" project has been finally lifted in the middle of June. Libra, a name evoking an ancient unit of weight, scales of justice and a somewhat clever jab at Winklevoss' Gemini, has already been written about extensively. 37. Learning from the Past to Create a Modern Financial System for the Digital Age The global financial system is comprised of a framework of legal agreements, institutions, and both formal and informal economic actors that together facilitate international flows of financial capital for purposes of investment and trade financing. Our current global financial systems are based on a series of historical events and innovations that brought us to where we are today. Historical markers such as the first minted coin, the use of paper money, the adoption of the US dollar as the international reserve currency, abandonment of the gold standard, and the ubiquity of mobile payments have all greatly influenced the way we exchange and store value on a micro and macro scale. 38. Comparing Algorand and Libra: The Road to Decentralization August 12, 2019 39. Resources: Programming Ownership on The Blockchain Smart contracts are a unique class of software explicitly designed to manage ownership of valuable digital assets. While existing programming environments can be used to keep track of the ownership of assets, they are most typically used in scenarios where they are reflecting ownership rather than defining it directly. Smart contracts are unique in that the value they represent is often embodied directly in the state they maintain. 40. How to Mint Stablecoins Based on Bitcoin? The Libra project raised market’s attention to stablecoin to an unprecedented level. It not only forces global financial regulatory bodies and central banks to take necessary measures, but also stimulates market’s enthusiasm in developing more stablecoins. Since Libra’s project scope is too large, it assumes a lot of risks. There is a big uncertainty in its future. But, Libra’s design and its experience can certainly be learned by other stablecoin projects. Better designed and more feasible stablecoins can be brought to the market. 41. Will Facebook and Telegram Kill Bitcoin and Ethereum? 2019 has marked itself not only with the end of the crypto winter but also with time when established technology companies entered the blockchain field. Telegram is going to release its own blockchain with the goal of processing millions of transactions per second. Facebook plans to introduce Libra coin to facilitate payments for 1.7 billion unbanked but connected people. 42. What lies ahead for crypto-exchanges in 2020? Experts' opinion on the trade war, halving, and Libra The mid-term results for the cryptographic industry in 2019 still remain uncertain. On one hand, market capitalization increased by 125 per cent in the second quarter alone. On the other, users have already lost more than $4 billion this year due to the actions of hackers and scammers, which is more than the entire year of 2018. It is unlikely that 2019 will meet the original expectations. Yet, experts predict a lot of interesting happenings for crypto exchanges in 2020. 43. Facebook's Libra And China: The Real Scenario Photo Credit: Christoph Scholz Flickr via Compfight ccThe people and government of China should be mostly concerned about Facebook’s intended launch of the Libra. The story didn’t just end there because Facebook said that in addition to Libra, the project will also issue a “Libra investment token.” 44. Facebook Libra: on the 4 steps road for World Presidency... Something changed on the 18th of June 2019. The day that Libra went public. Facebook’s long rumoured cryptocurrency project, which has rallied 28 world-leading partners, came out of the closet, and with it this new asset class seems to have landed its first concrete, large scale application. With over 2.7 billion users spread across all of its platforms1(Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram), and in response to recent strides into the payment sector and digital wallets by the likes of Samsung, Apple and Tencent, it was time for the group led by Mark Zuckerberg to finally wade into the great cryptocurrency arms race unfolding before us. 45. To Libra or not To Libra An interesting fact about Libra Facebook’s native currency which was announced June 18th, it’s inspired from three distinct elements: the Roman weight measurement system, the astrological sign for justice, and the French term  for freedom. 46. Everything wrong with Ethereum in 2019 The purpose of this state of the union is the criticize aspects of the Ethereum project and bring awareness to fixable issues while combating general ignorance of cryptocurrencies and the blockchain. 47. Facebook’s Libra Coin and PayPal's “Commitment Issues” MasterCard and PayPal Backing out of the Promised $10M Investments and more... 48. Libra, Frax, The Battle of the Centuries and The Rise of The Meta-Dollar Alfred Owen Crozier 1912, on the "Aldrich Plan," 49. The Complete Guide to Stablecoins in 2019 50. Everything Wrong with Bitcoin in 2019 This editorial was first published in Coinmonks, now re-syndicated with permission and discretion of the original author to reach wider audiences. Thank you for checking out the 50 most read stories about Libra on HackerNoon. to find the most read stories about any technology. Visit the /Learn Repo

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