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Where will Bitcoin be a few years from now?
The recently concluded Bitcoin & the Blockchain Summit in San Francisco on January 27 came up as a vivid source of both anxiety and inspiration. As speakers tackled Bitcoin’s technological limits and possible drawbacks that can be caused by impending regulations, Bitcoin advocate Andreas Antonopoulos lifted up everyone’s hope by discussing how bitcoins will eventually survive and flourish. He managed to do so with no graphics or presentations to prove his claim, just his utmost confidence and conviction that it really will no matter what.

On the currency being weak

There have been statements about Bitcoin’s technology surviving, but not the currency itself. Antonopoulos, however, argues that Bitcoin’s technology, network, and currency are interdependent with each other, which means that one element won’t work without the other. He said: “A consensus network that bases its value on the currency does not work without the currency.”

On why Bitcoin works

Antonopoulos underscores the fact that Bitcoin works because it is a dumb, transaction-processing network. Calling Bitcoin dumb is far from disparaging Bitcoin’s image as he actually thinks of this dumbness as Bitcoin’s true source of strength. According to him, it is a dumb network that supports smart devices, pushing all of the intelligence to the edge. It’s an innovation without permission.

On being 2014’s worst investment

Antonopoulos also argues that those who believe bitcoins to be a bad investment only considers the price when there are other equally important factors to be looked upon such as continuous investments and technological innovations.

For instance, 500 startups were created in 2014, which generated $500 million worth of investments and produced thousands of jobs, some portion from Bitcoin gambling. This was also the year that two remarkably genuine technologies were created, the multi-sig and hierarchal deterministic (HD) wallets.

On waiting for Bitcoin to flourish in 2017

Antonopoulos then stated with unwavering certainty: “Give us two years. Now what happens when you throw 500 companies and 10,000 developers at the problem? Give (it) two years and you will see some pretty amazing things in bitcoin.”

On mining updates

Meanwhile, mining for bitcoins prove to be more challenging than before. A Bitcoin mining facility in China, for instance, generates 4,050 bitcoins every month, which is equivalent to around $1.5 million, but not without repercussions and complexities. The entrepreneurs in the mining facility realize that as the level of difficulty and computing power increase, the ratio also gradually changes.

Typically, the entire mining procedure utilizes about 1,250 kilowatt-hours of electricity, putting the factory’s electricity bill to about $80,000 every month. Nowadays, their miners produce 20–25 bitcoins a day, significantly lesser compared with their previously 100 mined bitcoins per day.

On leaving a thought

The confidence for Bitcoin’s bright future has been regained, thanks to Antonopoulos’ contagious exhilaration and resolute belief in its potential. However, we can only wonder what the increasing difficulties in mining for bitcoins entail to the cryptocurrency’s overall performance and future, though Bitcoin’s unique features have been proven to be strong and resilient enough to surpass any challenges.

By Michael S. Malone — MIT Technology Review

The view from Mike Steep’s office on Palo Alto’s Coyote Hill is one of the greatest in Silicon Valley.

Beyond the black and rosewood office furniture, the two large computer monitors, and three Indonesian artifacts to ward off evil spirits, Steep looks out onto a panorama stretching from Redwood City to Santa Clara. This is the historic Silicon Valley, the birthplace of Hewlett-Packard and Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel and Atari, Netscape and Google. This is the home of innovations that have shaped the modern world. So is Steep’s employer: Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, where personal computing and key computer-­networking technologies were invented, and where he is senior vice president of global business operations.

And yet Mike Steep is disappointed at what he sees out the windows.
Read more

Ariel Schwartz — FastCo

No matter how many coding initiatives for women and diversity programs are launched, the inescapable fact remains: The tech industry is overloaded with men, especially in the top ranks. It’s an vicious cycle. The more men are hired for top jobs, the more they tend to hire men themselves.

Entrepreneurs Eileen Carey and Lauren Mosenthal believe the best path to gender equality is peer mentorship—that is, mentorship from people at your same skill and career level. So they created Glassbreakers, an online platform that matches women in tech (product managers, software engineers, data scientists, and so on) with peer mentors. It’s a little like online dating for mentors.

Read more

Vires in Bitcoin
Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency has had its moments of strength and weakness. The technology behind bitcoins, however, is a different story. While skeptics don’t expect a lot from Bitcoin as an alternative currency because of its volatility, they do have high hopes for the technological innovation that powers it, believing that it can be further developed to create something much powerful than Bitcoin itself.

To those who know Bitcoin as a great way of transacting online, but don’t completely understand its dynamics, it’s time to get acquainted with the cryptocurrency’s mathematical wonders that make anonymous, faster, and cheaper transactions of moving funds on the internet possible.

Most of us know that Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 hashing algorithm, but hashing serves a different function and purpose from that of digital signatures. Hashing actually provides proof that a message has not been changed because running the same hash always generates similar result.

Any message, regardless of the size can go into a hash function where the algorithm breaks it down, combines the parts, and “digests” it until it makes a fixed-length outcome called “digest”. However, a good hashing algorithm possesses some critical characteristics, in which the same message always produces the same result, as mentioned above, and it only works in one direction.

This means that even the smallest change creates a completely different digest. This is called the “avalanche effect”. Also, the chances of generating the same digest from a transformed message are a tad rare. This is called “collision resistance”.

Such nature of Bitcoin’s hash function makes it impossible to change records and transactions once they have been documented. As soon as the hashes are hashed together within the blockchain, counterfeiting records of transactions is no way near possible.

Then there’s the technology of wallet software. This is where people store bitcoins and use for making transactions. The wallet system is set in which users are prohibited from spending the same units twice (double-spending) by checking new transactions against the blockchain and against other new transactions to ensure the same units are not being cited more than once.

Though this system was established to avoid fraudulent activities and has proven to be an effective one, it also became an ideal scenario for hacking attacks on a Bitcoin exchange that aim to steal bitcoins. It’s because once bitcoins are lost, they’re gone for good and there’s no way of reclaiming them, especially that cryptocurrency usage is not covered by the central government and other intermediary parties like banks. Nonetheless, it’s not totally the Bitcoin’s fault; it’s the Bitcoin exchanges’ security measures.

The Economist

IN THE 50 years between the end of the American civil war in 1865 and the outbreak of the first world war in 1914, a group of entrepreneurs spearheaded America’s transformation from an agricultural into an industrial society, built gigantic business empires and amassed huge fortunes. In 1848 John J. Astor, a merchant trader, was America’s richest man with $20m (now $545m). By the time the United States entered the first world war, John D. Rockefeller had become its first billionaire.

In the 50 years since Data General introduced the first mini-computers in the late 1960s, a group of entrepreneurs have spearheaded the transformation of an industrial age into an information society, built gigantic business empires and acquired huge fortunes. When he died in 1992, Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, was probably America’s richest man with $8 billion. Today Bill Gates occupies that position with $82.3 billion.

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Quoted: “Looking at the misinformation, speculation, and confusion about bitcoin and blockchain technology: it’s the same conversation we had 20 years ago with the Internet. In the early 90s, the only way you could check your email was through a command line prompt. Then, web browsers were developed, small websites were created, and…well, as you can see, a lot has changed since. It’s looking as though bitcoin is just the first app to use blockchain technology, just like email was the first app to use the Internet.”

Read the article, and learn about the January 27, 2015, conference, here > http://radar.oreilly.com/2015/01/bitcoin-is-just-the-first-a…ology.html

lifeboat-min
From Innovation to Oblivion…

The ups and downs of Bitcoin as an internet currency may be compared to the eventual demise of Google Glass due to its lack of purpose among consumers. While it does not significantly hold true for bitcoins, which apparently have a more supportive and enthusiastic followers, the path that these two have taken and will take may be substantially similar than we like to admit.

For one, Bitcoin’s staggering price decline in the recent days left some people wondering what road it will eventually take in the near future. Is it only taking a detour or is it bound for a dead end?

In the case of Google Glass, it received much attention during its inception a few years ago. It was even named by Time magazine one of the best innovations of 2012. However, despite the ingenuity behind a supposed-to-be groundbreaking invention, Google Glass lacked a tangible sense, its purpose incoherent.

Thus, after much speculation, Google recently announced that it would stop selling Glass and that the product would no longer be developed in their research division.

Will Bitcoin End Up Like Google Glass?

Google Glass and Bitcoin are connected by the revolutionary technology that made them a star in the first place. There was some genius work in each of the piece, there’s no doubt about that, but without a clear purpose of how to integrate each product into the mainstream society, it becomes pointless.

Fortunately, bitcoins may stand a chance. Though there’s a portion of the populace that thinks of bitcoins as the internet currency that’s only best suited for illegal activities, its original function, which is for faster and cheaper way of transacting online, still proves to be prevalent.

It’s true that bitcoins were way more fun before that they are now, but it cannot be denied that this cryptocurrency has opened doors for a myriad of possibilities and eliminated security vulnerabilities, in which financial institutions such as banks and credit card companies are relatively known for.

Unlike Google Glass, Bitcoin has a tangible sense, a coherent purpose, and a crystal-clear vision. That is to move around the internet with your money free from the control of the government or any institution. Since there’s nothing that precedes this work of art and technology, it has a chance of staying. Thus, Bitcoin’s game is far from over.

Quoted: “IBM has unveiled its proof of concept for ADEPT, a system developed in partnership with Samsung that uses elements of bitcoin’s underlying design to build a distributed network of devices – a decentralized Internet of Things. The ADEPT concept, or Autonomous Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Telemetry, taps blockchains to provide the backbone of the system, utilizing a mix of proof-of-work and proof-of-stake to secure transactions.”

Read the article here > http://www.coindesk.com/ibm-reveals-proof-concept-blockchain…et-things/

GM Overcoming Toyota & Ford Surmounting Honda, Unfailingly, For Life!

00000000 400 dpi LBF

FIRST

The reason why Japanese automotive industry beat the U.S. car-makers is because, to them, it is an outright existential world to win and in the process spread a sense of Japanese exceptionalism.

They are fighting a most-lucrative World War merciless!

SECOND

The reason why car-makers in the U.S. can overcome the Japanese and German competition is a bit complicated.

THIRD

Except, perhaps for Apple, all Quality Assurance Methodologies in the U.S. manufactures designated to provide high-end products fail, and fail, and fail again.

FOURTH

However, when you see the Quality Assurance methodologies in the Military, you will notice the following:

(PER AS-OF-NOW RANKINGS)

America’s has the most-breathtaking quality in the Military, worldwide.

European quality is the second best in the Military, worldwide.

Israeli quality is the third best in the Military, worldwide.

Russian quality is the fourth best in the Military, worldwide.

Chinese quality is the fifth best in the Military, worldwide.

FIFTH

FOR AMERICAN AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY TO BEST THE JAPANESE AND GERMAN, THROUGHPUTTING HIGH-END HAS TO BE CONSIDERED AS AN EXISTENTIAL REALPOLITIK GLOBAL WORLD, THAT SHOULD UPGRADED EVERY STANDARD AND PRACTICES, BY MOST CAREFULLY OBSERVING AND INSTITUTING THE STANDARDS AND PRACTICES OF THE U.S. MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX’S FIRST THREE (3) PRIVATE CONTRACTORS.

SIXTH

The day that American Automotive Industry starts to manufacture cars like most-complex state-of the-art weapons, the foreign car-makers will go bankrupt and the profits and jobs will be back to America.

SEVENTH

America makes the best PRODUCTS IN THE WORLD when it fears a massive stream of Sputniks. Otherwise, U.S. citizens go back to their zone of comfort and assume that the World is most characterized by RUTHLESS IMPERMANENCE.

THEREBY:

AND NOTA BENE, IT MUST BE, INCESSANTLY AND FOREVER, ACKNOWLEDGED:

Exactly like Andres Agostini, Egotistical Prima Donna (SkunkWorks practitioner) is no longer a captive to history.

Exactly like Andres Agostini, Whatever he, she can imagine, he, she can accomplish.

Exactly like Andres Agostini, Egotistical Prima Donna (SkunkWorks practitioner) is no longer a vassal in a faceless bureaucracy, he, she is an activist, not a drone.

Exactly like Andres Agostini, Egotistical Prima Donna (SkunkWorks practitioner) is no longer a foot soldier in the march of progress.

Exactly like Andres Agostini, Egotistical Prima Donna (SkunkWorks practitioner) is a Revolutionary! … ”

ABSOLUTE END.

Authored By Copyright Mr. Andres Agostini

White Swan Book Author (Source of this Article)

http://www.LINKEDIN.com/in/andresagostini

http://www.AMAZON.com/author/agostini

https://www.FACEBOOK.com/heldenceo (Other Publications)

http://LIFEBOAT.com/ex/bios.andres.agostini

http://ThisSUCCESS.wordpress.com

https://www.FACEBOOK.com/agostiniandres

http://www.appearoo.com/aagostini

http://connect.FORWARDMETRICS.com/profile/1649/Andres-Agostini.html

https://www.FACEBOOK.com/amazonauthor

http://FUTURE-OBSERVATORY.blogspot.com

http://ANDRES-AGOSTINI-on.blogspot.com

http://AGOSTINI-SOLVES.blogspot.com

@AndresAgostini

@ThisSuccess

@SciCzar

CROSS-FUNCTIONAL AWAKEN, YET CONDITIONALIZED CONSCIOUSNESS AS PER NON-GIRLIE U.S. HARD ROCKET SCIENTISTS!

0000 GIRLY SUPER OVERMAN

(Excerpted from the White Swan Book)

Sequential and Progressive Tidbits as Follows:

SEQUENTIAL AND PROGRESSIVE TIDBIT # 1 OF # 5

” .… Consciousness is the process of creating a model of the world using multiple feedback loops in various parameters (e.g., in temperature, space, time, and in relation to others), in order to accomplish a goal (e.g., find mates, food, shelter)…”

SEQUENTIAL AND PROGRESSIVE TIDBIT # 2 OF # 5

” … Human consciousness is a specific form of consciousness that creates a model of the world (Weltanchaung ) and then simulates it in time [there is to say: RAND Corporation’s Dr. Strangeloves’s Scenario-Planning Methodology], by evaluating the past time to simulate the future [never by retrospection but acute prospections]. This requires mediating and evaluating many feedback loops [at times, also including close-loop feedbacks], with the [strategic] end to make a [sound and sustainably profitable] decision to [concomitantly] achieve a [driven by numerical data] goal and an [driven by narrative data] objective …”

SEQUENTIAL AND PROGRESSIVE TIDBIT # 3 OF # 5

” … The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine [via outright scientific futuring] objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real [, which is also to say in the PERCEIVED Corporate Theater of Operations], and it is this ability [and capability] that allows [and empowers] us to think about the future. As one philosopher noted, the human brain is an ’ …anticipation machine …’ [that is to say, a biological foresighting and farsighting apparatus] and ’ …making the future …’ [creating the desired output] is the most important thing it does …”

SEQUENTIAL AND PROGRESSIVE TIDBIT # 4 OF # 5

Dr. Gamel Hamel, a great U.S. citizen, is, as per my understanding, America’s top I.Q. #25. He was the CEO to Strategos and currently a prominent scholar and he is fully-tenured Professor Gary Hamel, PhD. at pervasive London Business School. Hamel, incessantly, pays a great deal of attention to REALITY and the quote below, excerpted in the White Swan book, is used by him frequently.

VERBATIM:

“… [He] tells a wonderful little story about how he came to recognize this deep truth: On the third day of a conference at a Buddhist center, I asked people why they put their palms together several times a day. THE BUDDHISTS BELIEVE THAT THE WORLD IS AN ILLUSION, BUT WE HAVE TO GO ALONG WITH THE ILLUSION FOR EFFICIENCY REASONS. When they put their hands together it is a semicolon, an acknowledgment that whatever they may think is going on right now is largely a fabrication of their own mind…”

TO UNDERPIN ALL OF THE ABOVE, BUT ESPECIALLY SEQUENTIAL AND PROGRESSIVE TIDBIT # 4, THIS MUST AS WELL BE OBSERVED:

AS THE GREAT VICTORIAN BIOLOGIST THOMAS HUXLEY (4 MAY 1825 – 29 JUNE 1895) ONCE SAID,

” …The question of all questions for humanity, the problem which lies behind all others and is more interesting than any of them, IS THAT OF THE DETERMINATION OF MAN’S PLACE IN NATURE AND HIS RELATION TO THE COSMOS [THE ULTIMATE ATEMPORAL AND ASPATIAL ZENITH OF AWAKEN CONSCIOUSNESS AND HENCE INTELLIGENCE AND WISDOM] …” (ASIN: B00KMY0DLK).

SEQUENTIAL AND PROGRESSIVE TIDBIT # 5 OF # 5

BY THE WAY, COUNTER-INTUITIVENESS AND SIXTH SENSE AND ETHICS AND INTEGRITY HAVE NO GENDER.

To shed some light, I will also share two quotes as well.

NEVERTHELESS, THE PANCHATANTRA (BODY OF EASTERN PHILOSOPHICAL KNOWLEDGE) ESTABLISHES,

“… Knowledge is the true organ of sight, not the eyes [neither combined with and through the pineal gland] … ”

AND ANTONIO MACHADO ARGUES,

“… An eye is not an eye because you see it; an eye is an eye because it sees you …”

Managers always need a clear-eyed and lucid pineal gland’s knowledgeable and knowledge-injected vision.

DID YOU ALREADY CONNECT THE DOTS STEMMING FROM THE PANCHATANTRA AND MACHADO?

Did you already integrate those dots into your marshable gestalt’s big-picture vista?

As side effect, British Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone considered,

“…You cannot fight against the future…”

TO THIS PURPOSE AND GIVEN TO ME BY A SEPHARDI HEBREW DECADES AGO, AN ARAB ADAGE ARGUES,

“… The one who foretells the future correctly, lies even if he is telling the truth correctly …”

HOWEVER, AS A COUNTERPOINT LOCKHEED MARTIN ARGUES:

“… What’s impossible today won’t be [so] tomorrow …”

ABSOLUTE END.

Authored By Copyright Mr. Andres Agostini

White Swan Book Author (Source of this Article)

http://www.LINKEDIN.com/in/andresagostini

http://www.AMAZON.com/author/agostini

https://www.FACEBOOK.com/heldenceo (Other Publications)

http://LIFEBOAT.com/ex/bios.andres.agostini

http://ThisSUCCESS.wordpress.com

https://www.FACEBOOK.com/agostiniandres

http://www.appearoo.com/aagostini

http://connect.FORWARDMETRICS.com/profile/1649/Andres-Agostini.html

https://www.FACEBOOK.com/amazonauthor

http://FUTURE-OBSERVATORY.blogspot.com

http://ANDRES-AGOSTINI-on.blogspot.com

http://AGOSTINI-SOLVES.blogspot.com

@AndresAgostini

@ThisSuccess

@SciCzar