China’s cryptocurrency and blockchain appreciation continue as Xinhua, another state-run media organization publishes a full article about bitcoin. Some commentators opine that the flurry of positive digital currency sentiments in the country is part of Beijing’s efforts to normalize the industry before introducing the proposed digital RMB.
Despite these positive signs, trading and initial coin offerings (ICOs) remain banned. However, there appears to be a movement towards nationalizing the Chinese crypto space. Such a move might prompt a response from state actors in the West to adopt more crypto-friendly policies or risk losing out to China in the race for control of the emerging digital landscape.
Stadelmann said that Komodo is similar to Ethereum but it is 100% independent, free and open-sourced platform.
“As the world is getting digitised, it is all based on binary digits. Binary digits can have either 1 (on) or 0 (off). We don’t speak of bits anymore but quantum qubits or quantum bits, which can be in both 1 and 0 states at the same time. This qubit can attain so many states at the same time and they are also able to process calculations at a much faster rate than classical computers,” he said.
As a blockchain platform, Stadelmann said that Komodo is trying to solve the problem and has implemented quantum-safe cryptographic solutions for the past couple of years which will not be able to crack cryptographic signatures.
“While researching epilepsy, neuroscientist Itzhak Fried stumbled on a ‘mirth’ center in the brain — given this, what ought we be doing to combat extreme suffering and promote wellbeing?”
David Pearce — The Anatomy of Happiness… While researching epilepsy, neuroscientist Itzhak Fried stumbled on a ‘mirth’ center in the brain — given this, what ought we be doing to combat extreme suffering and promote wellbeing?
If one finds oneself viscerally hostile to the idea of universal happiness, and if by contemporary standards one falls within the statistically normal range in one’s emotional repertoire, then just how seriously should one contemplate the following possibility? Today we are the victims of what our successors will reckon an atavistic mood disorder. This disorder infects all our thoughts as well as all our feelings and volitions. It is a historical condition no less epistemically defective than are dream-psychoses from the perspective of the waking state.
Is the worry one might be locked in such an affective psychosis just the product of idle scepticism? Given the cognitive inaccessibility of most of the generically ecstatic states alluded to here, perhaps one wouldn’t know if one were so afflicted. After all, damaged and disfigured minds may have limited self-insight. Nor would one necessarily have the conceptual resources even to grasp what was at stake if one suffered from such a neural deficit. Pure, “unearned”, genetically-driven bliss of even the mildest flavour detracted from the inclusive fitness of one’s genes in the ancestral environment. Constitutionally happy freaks-of-nature got eaten or outbred. Hence unipolar euphoric mania today is vanishingly rare; unipolar melancholic depression and chronic dysthymia are all too common. Is one’s potential unease, if not revulsion, at the prospect of paradise-on-earth an incidental cultural by-product of natural selection? Or has selection pressure ensured that one is genetically predisposed to be biased against the idea of enduring bliss in the first instance?
We face complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty about the future consequences of cryptocurrency use. There are doubts about the positive and negative impacts of the use of cryptocurrencies in the financial systems. In order to address better and deeper the contradictions and the consequences of the use of cryptocurrencies and also informing the key stakeholders about known and unknown emerging issues in new payment systems, we apply two helpful futures studies tools known as the “Future Wheel”, to identify the key factors, and “System Dynamics Conceptual Mapping”, to understand the relationships among such factors. Two key scenarios will be addressed. In on them, systemic feedback loops might be identified such as a) terrorism, the Achilles’ heel of the cryptocurrencies, b) hackers, the barrier against development, and c) information technology security professionals, a gap in the future job market. Also, in the other scenario, systemic feedback loops might be identified such as a) acceleration of technological entrepreneurship enabled by new payment systems, b) decentralization of financial ecosystem with some friction against it, c) blockchain and shift of banking business model, d) easy international payments triggering structural reforms, and e) the decline of the US and the end of dollar dominance in the global economy. In addition to the feedback loops, we can also identify chained links of consequences that impact productivity and economic growth on the one hand, and shift of energy sources and consumption on the other hand.
Today, it was announced that the SingularityNET and TODA ecosystems will be joining forces to create scalable platforms and a product accelerator for decentralized AI.
The partnership brings blockchain AI pioneer SingularityNET and its enterprise-AI spinoff Singularity Studio together with TODA.Network and TODAQ from the TODA Protocol family.
Technical teams from both ecosystems are experimenting with bringing the two technologies together on the operational level, by building a “Singularity-on-TODA” system in which SingularityNET AI agents can optionally utilize the TODA protocol rather than Ethereum for their interactions.
The cryptocurrency Bitcoin is limited by its astronomical electricity consumption and outsized carbon footprint. A nearly zero-energy alternative sounds too good to be true, but as School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) Professor Rachid Guerraoui explains, it all comes down to our understanding of what makes transactions secure.
To explain why the system developed in his Distributed Computing Lab (DCL) represents a paradigm shift in how we think about cryptocurrencies—and about digital trust in general—Professor Rachid Guerraoui uses a legal metaphor: all players in this new system are “innocent until proven guilty.”
This is in contrast to the traditional Bitcoin model first described in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, which relies on solving a difficult problem called “consensus” to guarantee the security of transactions. In this model, everyone in a distributed system must agree on the validity of all transactions to prevent malicious players from cheating—for example, by spending the same digital tokens twice (double-spending). In order to prove their honesty and achieve consensus, players must execute complex—and energy-intensive—computing tasks that are then verified by the other players.
SHA-256 is a one way hashing algorithm. Cracking it would have tectonic implications for consumers, business and all aspects of government including the military.
It’s not the purpose of this post to explain encryption, AES or SHA-256, but here is a brief description of SHA-256. Normally, I place reference links in-line or at the end of a post. But let’s get this out of the way up front:
One day after Treadwell Stanton DuPont claimed that a secret project cracked SHA-256 more than one year ago, they back-tracked. Rescinding the original claim, they announced that an equipment flaw caused them to incorrectly conclude that they had algorithmically cracked SHA-256.
