This is an excerpt of The Daily Wrap Up 3/25.
Full Episode Can Be Seen Here:
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Despite the crashing markets, companies are working hard to boost the further adoption of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. In two separate announcements, Coinbase and the popular internet browser Opera revealed that they’ve made serious strides in this regard.
Coinbase Card Usable With Google Pay
The leading cryptocurrency exchange in the US, Coinbase, allows its users to get a cryptocurrency card through a partnership with Visa. Now, the card has enabled users to spend Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies directly from their Coinbase account using Google Pay.
Many of you know the sad news that theoretical physicist & mathematician Freeman Dyson has passed away, so in celebration of his life and achievements, Anders Sandberg (Future of Humanity Institute) discusses Freeman Dyson’s influence on himself and others — How might advanced alien civilizations develop (and indeed perhaps our own)?
We discuss strategies for harvesting energy — star engulfing Dyson Spheres or Swarms, black hole swallowing tungsten dyson super-swarms and other galactic megastructures, we also discuss Kardashev scale civilizations (Kardashev was another great mind who we lost recently), reversible computing, birthing ideal universes to live in, Meinong’s jungle, ‘eschatological engineering’, the aestivation hypothesis, and how all this may inform strategies for thinking about the Fermi Paradox and what this might suggest about the likelihood of our civilization avoiding oblivion. though Anders is more optimistic than some about our chances of survival…
Anders Sandberg (Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford) is a seminal transhumanist thinker from way back who has contributed a vast amount of mind blowing material to futurology & philosophy in general. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Sandberg
The Riksbank, Sweden’s central bank, has announced the launch of a year-long pilot project of its proposed e-krona. The project will use distributed ledger technology inspired by the blockchains that run cryptocurrencies.
Cashless in Sweden: Physical cash is headed toward obsolescence in Sweden. Nearly everyone uses a mobile payment application called Swish, and it’s been estimated that retailers could stop accepting cash by 2023. This concerns the country’s central bankers, for two reasons. First, they fear that if the payment infrastructure is left completely to the private sector, certain groups might be excluded. Second, if people lose the ability to convert what’s in their commercial bank accounts into a form of “cash” backed by the government, it might undermine their faith in the money system.
That’s why, a few years ago, the Riksbank began investigating the possibility of a state-backed digital currency that might play a similar role to the one physical cash plays today.
PALO ALTO, Calif., Feb 5 (Reuters) — The Federal Reserve is looking at a broad range of issues around regulations and protections for digital payments and currencies, including the costs and potential benefits of issuing its own digital currency, Governor Lael Brainard said on Wednesday.
“By transforming payments, digitalization has the potential to deliver greater value and convenience at lower cost,” Brainard said in remarks prepared for delivery at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The speech did not touch on interest rates or the current economic outlook.
“But there are risks,” Brainard said, in a partial reprisal of her own and other global central bankers’ worries about the rise of private digital payment systems and currencies, including Facebook’s Libra digital currency project. “Some of the new players are outside the financial system’s regulatory guardrails, and their new currencies could pose challenges in areas such as illicit finance, privacy, financial stability, and monetary policy transmission.”
Cue in MolochDAO. Launched as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) by SpankChain co-founder and chief executive officer Ameen Soleimani earlier this year, MolochDAO puts members’ ether (ETH) tributes toward funding Ethereum projects that members vote on.
The can-do, do-it-yourself attitude of the group has proven popular in the Ethereum community and has already influenced several spinoffs, leading some to credit Moloch with a resurgence in Ethereum DAOs.
On August 16th, the DAO’s associated Twitter account reflected on what the group has accomplished in its first six months in operation.
O.o!
Portfolio manager and crypto analyst Mati Greenspan says billions of dollars are essentially sitting on the sidelines, ready to move into Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP and the altcoin market at large.
Greenspan is using data from the crypto research firm Messari, which shows that the total value of all stablecoins is just shy of $6 billion. Stablecoins are digital currencies that are pegged to traditional assets like fiat. They’re designed to maintain a steady value and offer crypto traders an easy way to sidestep the extreme volatility of the crypto markets.
“Everything is immensely conven…
China To Test Its Own Digital Currency. Will It Rival The Dollar Someday? Bitcoin promises users anonymity, but transactions using China’s digital currency would be tracked by its central bank. Experts say it could someday rival the dollar in international payments.
While the cryptocurrency didn’t perform that well in 2019, Ethereum (ETH) is one of the best-performing digital assets of all time, rallying from an ICO price under a dollar to the $160 where it is today.
Despite this jaw-dropping gain in and of itself, investors in the cryptocurrency believe it will go higher. So much higher than one analyst laid out a case for the cryptocurrency’s value to surge to $1 trillion, 13 digits.
For some perspective, a trillion-dollar Ethereum market capitalization at current price levels would equate to about a $9,000 ETH price, with the current supply in mind. The cryptocurrency reaching such lofty prices would require it to rally by over 5,000%. Crazy, right?
No matter how cheap or fast paid internet service gets, the Internet of Things (IOT) won’t take wings until we have ubiquitous access to a completely decentralized, open-standard network that does not require a provider subscription. This month, we may be a step closer.
Let’s talk about internet connected gadgets. Not just your phone or PC—and not even a microwave oven or light bulb. Instead, think of everyday objects that are much smaller and much less expensive. Think of things that seemingly have no need to talk with you.
Now think of applications in which these tiny things need to communicate with each other and not just with you. Think of the cost of this “thing” compared to the added cost of continuous communications. Do so many things really need to talk in the first place?
First, there were Trackers…
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