Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: economics – Page 135

This update is an adaptation of my recent answer to a Quora reader who was in a panic. She asked:

“What can I do after a hard drive crash?
How can I recover my cryptocurrency?”

In the past, I would address the immediate problem of course. (My answer is below). But to prepare for the next unfortunate event, I recommended a wallet type based on a user’s unique experience, expertise and comfort zone. I guided the reader to weigh trade-offs of important criteria: Security, portability, convenience, and quick access to assets).

I had believed that some types of wallets were better for some individuals, but that they required a background in cryptography—or at least a discipline for meticulous practices. As CEO of the Cryptocurrency Standards Association, I had also believed that simple, unified, and popular standards would emerge very soon. I figured that this would enable users to practice safe-wallet maintenance in their own homes.

I was wrong. Most crypto wallets have not sufficiently evolved to counter the risks and complexities of everyday scenarios —not even for expert users. The problem isn’t the fault of any one vendor or hosted online service. It is that all of these gadgets, apps and services have not gotten together behind a single set of risk standards to a point where they become simple, standardized and compliant-friendly in the real world.

The lack of comprehensive standards and best practices dealing with total loss of access can bite anyone in the tush. Expertise and experience be d*mned. Today, I recommend only two types of wallets. All others are simply too risky to play a role in any financial portfolio. They set the stage for losing your wealth and health in so many plausible scenarios:

  • If your electronic device is lost, hacked, stolen or run over by a truck
  • If you become incapacitated or die
  • If you forget a secret, or where you stored it
  • If you have no idea what is “multisig” and don’t care to learn strange new practices
  • If an online cloud service or exchange goes dark or mysteriously disappears

Here is my answer to the reader who urgently needs to recover from a disk drive crash. After dealing with that crisis (it’s not at all pretty), I explain what do do in the future…

Question: “How can I recover my cryptocurrency after a hard drive crash?”

Bear in mind that your digital wallet doesn’t really hold wealth or coins. It holds a private key that lets you access your wealth on the blockchain. The key is like a password, but you cannot choose your own and it is too complex to remember. And so, you need a place to store it. That’s all a wallet really is.

If you stored this key on an electronic device (or in a software app or even on paper), but with no way to recover it—in case the device is lost, broken, hacked or stolen—then you are screwed! Your bitcoin still exists, but access to it has been lost forever.

Let’s be extra clear: If the device cannot be repaired or recovered, there is absolutely nothing you can do except lick your wounds and learn from your experience.

Now, let’s talk about next time…

A beautiful trait of crypto is that you can back up your wallet easily. The elegant and secure way to do this is by creating a list of 11 or more common dictionary words and placing this list where you and 2 or 3 trusted friends can always find it. The ability to generate this list of words is a Bitcoin standard. It greatly reduces the risk of loss—but only if you are aware of the feature, make use of it, and periodically practice asset recovery.*

But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s back up, and describe the way to store your keys…

There are only two ways that you should stash cryptocurrency until we reach a day when standards, best practice and multisig escrow are second nature, trivial and understood by everyone.

You can either (1) trust a custodial exchange, or (2) use a hardware wallet. In a nod to smart phones and software apps, I will describe something that they are good for in these safety tips. But your go-to wallet should never be an app.

1. Trust a custodial exchange like Coinbase or Bitstamp

Despite what your Libertarian friends have told you (“It misses the whole point of owning crypto!”, don’t dismiss this option so quickly. A traditional bank/brokerage model offers several benefits which are important to some individuals. We’ll get to those in the bulleted list below.

Choose an exchange that is compliant (fully licensed and follows regulations for all activities). They must be well capitalized by reputable investors and subject to random, outside audit. The two mentioned above belong to this very small class of exchange-wallet services.

The exchange holds your crypto in their own offline vault and gives you access on demand through an account user interface using two-factor authentication. The process can be frustrating, if you lose your smart phone and haven’t prepared or practiced for such an inevitability. That’s because they must be absolutely certain that access is being made by you or someone that you have authorized

Why would anyone want a service to control their assets? There are good reasons:

  • Since their main business is acting as an exchange, broker or market maker, you can quickly shift assets into Fiat or other cryptocurrencies
  • Their meticulous record-keeping aids your own end-of-year tax reporting
  • A real person can help with confusing or unexpected circumstances
  • Just as with a bank or stockbroker, you can designate heirs, a spouse or co-owner, and your anticipated executor or a relative with power of attorney
  • A reputable custodian makes it difficult to accidentally lose access to wealth

But what about security standards? With all of the exchange failures, the lack of an insurance framework, and many that have simply lost or fled with customer assets, can you trust an exchange to implement security in the very best way?

Ultimately, a reputable exchange that practices security drills, subjects itself to outside audits and has investors with lots to loose is more likely than you to implement, update and rigorously practice safe methodology. This may change in the future, as standards and practices become more clear, unified and easier to follow. But for now, the traditional bank model makes sense for a great many users. I have owned Bitcoin for ten years, and I have only switched from Coinbase to method #2, below, in the last month.

Continue reading “Lack of standards leads to new Bitcoin wallet advice” | >

As with other recent articles, this one was originally published as an answer to a member of Quora, a Q&A site in which I am a cryptocurrency columnist. And just like the previous one in this Lifeboat series (also posted today), this is a Q&A exchange with a newbie—a bitcoin beginner.

The question is simply: “How can Bitcoin be divided into units smaller than one?” While the answer may seem obvious to someone versed in math, statistics or economics, I see this question a lot—or something very similar.

I can explain by asking a nearly identical question; one that the enquirer can probably answer easily. The goal is to provide the tools to answer the question—and in a manner that helps the reader recall and make use of the answer in the future. This is how I approached an answer…

Puzzle me this: Can you divide 100 into smaller pieces? Of course you can! You just divvy it up. After all, it’s just a number.

Continue reading “How can Bitcoin be divided into small units?” | >

This article was originally an answer to a member of Quora, a Q&A site in which I am a cryptocurrency columnist. The reader is a “Bitcoin beginner”. If you understand the nature and purpose of a blockchain, the political leanings of Satoshi or the economics of a capped cryptocurrency, then this reviews things that you already know. But sometimes, a recap can be fun. It helps ensure that we are all on the same page…

In a previous post, we have already addressed a fundamental question:

It has nothing to do with how many individuals can own bitcoin or its useful applications. It simply means that—if widely adopted as a payment instrument or as cash itself—the number of total units is capped at 21 million. But each unit can subdivided into very tiny pieces, and we can even give the tiny pieces a new name (like femto-btc or Satoshis). It is only the originally named unit (the BTC) that is capped.

But, this article addresses a more primitive question. (Actually, it is a naïve question, but this adjective has a negative connotation, which is not intended). I interpret the question to be: What prevents me from creating, earning or being awarded an amount that brings the total circulation above 21 million BTC?

The question is a bit like asking Why there are only two solutions to a quadratic equation? — Or (a metaphor): Why can’t you own a new Picasso painting?

In the case of Picasso, it’s because we know the ownership and location of the 1,885 paintings created during his lifetime. The Old Guitarist (shown at bottom) is at the Art Institute of Chicago. Unless there has been a serious error in record keeping, there cannot be any more paintings, because he is no longer around to produce new art.

You cannot create more bitcoin than the 21 million scheduled for release because that’s all the math yields. It is the capped quantity that Satoshi wanted in circulation—because he/she sought to create a deflationary token that could never be gamed by politicians or anyone else.

Consider the alternative. The Zimbabwe dollar had no cap. When the government needed more cash, they simply printed more. (This is exactly what the US does today). Eventually, they had 4 recalls and “official” devaluations. But, of course, the value of a Zimbabwe dollar (just like a US dollar, bitcoin or a Picasso painting) is not established by edict. It floats with supply and demand.

Eventually, 100 trillion Zimbabwe dollars was worth US 16¢. Then, it collapsed completely. You can still find a few 100 trillion dollar notes on Ebay. Ironically, they cost far more than 16¢, because western collectors are fascinated by them. Just as with a Picasso painting, all value boils down to supply and demand.

Of course, no citizen of means used the local currency even before it collapsed. They simply couldn’t trust their treasury. Today, Zimbabwe uses US dollars, rands (SA), British pound and euros.

What about the US dollar? Only the most arrogant citizens believe that we control such a vast consumer market (and that we are such a huge debtor) that the world must continue to value our paper. But is this realistic? Is it sustainable? Does U.S. debt ever have to be repaid with real sweat and real products sought by creditor nations? Of course it does. The alternatives are unthinkable: We would go the way of Zimbabwe, the Roman empire—or worse. Think of the Wiemar Republic between world wars.

The US dollar has no cap. A trillion or so new dollars are printed ever year, in a series of emergency measures that transient politicians call “raising the debt ceiling”, or an “emergency requisition”, or humanitarian, infrastructure, disaster relief, military necessity, debt repayment—or whatever. This leaves us 20 trillion in debt and with no path to recovery. Our own president openly asked why we can’t just print even more money to square up with our creditors.

With Bitcoin, we will never face that problem. Will adopting Bitcoin as legal tender interfere with a government’s ability to tax, spend or enforce tax collection? Not at all! But one day, it will decouple governments from control of their money supply. And that will be a marvelous thing—for both individuals, organizations and governments. It will force nations to balance their books—just like every household, business, NGO and municipality.

When this happens, governments can still raise money (from taxes) and they can even borrow. But just as with an individual or corporation, they will need to find:

  • Creditors (or shareholders) who truly believe in the ability to repay
  • This means they are creditors that believe in a nations institutions & ethics
  • And this leads to a conclusion: What better way to move our institutions and ethics in the right direction than through the accountability owned to our creditors.

Bitcoin is the embodiment of radical technology, but it is not a radical concept. It is the simple and functional embodiment of free-market economics. It addresses a market need that Aristotle fervently researched 2050 years ago, but failed to resolve. Gradual adoption is analogous to denationalization of telephony, airlines and package delivery services. Imagine the positive fallout when this occurs! Hopefully, we will around to witness a society in which governments are decoupled from monetary policy & control!

Related:

Philip Raymond co-chairs CRYPSA, hosts the Bitcoin Event and is keynote speaker at Cryptocurrency Conferences. He is a top writer at Quora.

A new section: Bitcoin ATM business model
has been added. Jump to “2019 Update”

The good news is that building a Bitcoin ATM is easy and less expensive than you might expect. But, offering or operating them engulfs the assembler in a regulatory minefield! It might just be worth sticking to selling bitcoin on PayPal (visit this website for more information on that). You might also wish to rethink your business model —especially user-demand. That’s the topic of our 2019 update at the bottom of this article.

A photo of various Bitcoin ATMs appears at the bottom of this article. My employer, Cryptocurrency Standards Association, shared start-up space at a New York incubator with the maker of a small, wall mounted ATM, like the models shown at top left.

What is Inside a Cryptocurrency ATM?

You could cobble together a Bitcoin ATM with just a cheap Android tablet, a camera, an internet connection, and [optional]: a secure cash drawer with a mechanism to count and dispense currency).* A receipt printer that can also generate a QR code is a nice touch, but you don’t really need one. You can use your screen for the coin transfer and email for a receipt.

Continue reading “Update: Building (and placing!) a Bitcoin ATM” | >

Once a booming industry that offered dream jobs to China’s young talents, China’s tech sector is now waking up to the sobering reality. Experts say it is time to focus on profitability, rather than the wild expansion of previous years, as China’s economic growth slows and the trade war with the United States hits sentiment and investment.

Read more | >

First published in 2016, predictors of chronological and biological age developed using deep learning (DL) are rapidly gaining popularity in the aging research community.

These deep aging clocks can be used in a broad range of applications in the pharmaceutical industry, spanning target identification, drug discovery, data economics, and synthetic patient data generation. We provide here a brief overview of recent advances in this important subset, or perhaps superset, of aging clocks that have been developed using artificial intelligence (AI).

Read more | >

Eleven million people had renewable energy jobs in 2018, according to the latest analysis from IRENA. New data shows that the diversification of the renewable energy supply chain is changing the sector’s geographic footprint, and more countries are tapping into the socio-economic gains of the energy transition. https://bit.ly/2XFScWF

Read more | >

Seemingly “intelligent” devices like self-driving trucks aren’t actually all that intelligent. In order to avoid plowing into other cars or making illegal lane changes, they need a lot of help.

In China, that help is increasingly coming from rooms full of college students.

Li Zhenwei is a data labeler. His job, which didn’t even exist a few years ago, involves sitting at a computer, clicking frame-by-frame through endless hours of dashcam footage, and drawing lines over each photo to help the computer recognize lane markers.

“Every good-looking field has people working behind the scenes,” says Li. “I’d prefer to be an anonymous hero.”

Li, and many of his classmates at a local vocational school, are benefiting from the Chinese government’s push to move away from an economy based on heavy industry, and toward one focused on high tech.

Li doesn’t have a degree in computer science. So for him, this is a new opportunity to get a foot in the door of a booming tech industry.

Continue reading “China’s Big AI Advantage: Humans” | >

With its growing aging population, Singapore has a looming crisis, but could also be primed to become a major player in the rejuvenation biotechnology industry.

Singapore has one of the fastest-aging populations in the world. Senior citizens 65 years old or older are expected to make up almost half of Singapore’s population by 2050. Unfortunately, this swelling population is spending more time living with sickness, even though they live longer. While average lifespans have been extended, healthspans have not. [1] Singaporeans have an impressive average life expectancy of 84.8 years, but an average Singaporean born in 2017 is predicted to spend the last ten and a half years in sickness, compared to how a Singaporean born in 1999 is likely to spend only nine twilight years in deteriorating health.

This is becoming a massive concern for the Singaporean government because of the financial strain that this is imposing on Singapore’s budget. Having the world’s second-lowest birth rate coupled with a rapidly aging population means that the ratio of working adults to senior citizens is quickly shrinking. In 2007, there were 6.9 working adults for every senior citizen. By 2030, there will be 2.3 working adults per senior citizen.

In under a decade, Singapore’s healthcare budget more than doubled from S$4 billion in 2010 to S$10 billion in 2017. [2] Among the developed nations of the world, Singapore has a reputation for being one of the most fiscally conservative; there’s a socio-political stigma against the term “welfare state” in Singapore. Since its unprecedented independence in 1965, Singapore has had a general zeitgeist of “every man for himself,” as we are a nation with no natural resources. Our highly-educated workforce, along with our strategic geographical location, is the primary resource undergirding our knowledge-based economy.

Read more | >

A new project announced last week will start helping close the gap, though. The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (NJBPU) chose Ørsted of Denmark to build a 1.1 gigawatt wind farm off the coast of Atlantic City. Dubbed (somewhat un-originally) Ocean Wind, the farm will be the biggest of its kind in the US and is estimated to be done by 2024. For comparison, the only wind farm currently operating in the US, off the coast of Rhode Island, has a paltry 30-megawatt production capacity.

Ocean Wind’s 1.1 gigawatts of energy will be enough to power about 500,000 homes. The project is slated to create 15,000 new jobs and generate up to $1.2 billion in additional economic benefits.

As of May of this year, there were 15 proposals in the works for new offshore wind farms along the US east coast (and that doesn’t include projects in California, Hawaii, South Carolina, and New York).

Read more | >