Lifeboat Foundation

I administer the Bitcoin P2P discussion group at LinkedIn, a social media network for professionals. A frequent question posed by newcomers and even seasoned venture investors is: “How can I understand Bitcoin in its simplest terms?”

Engineers and coders offer answers that are anything but simple. Most focus on mining and the blockchain. In this primer, I will take an approach that is both familiar and accurate…

Terms/Concepts: • Miners • Blockchain • Double-Spend

First, forget about everything you have heard about ‘mining’ Bitcoin. That’s just a temporary mechanism to smooth out the initial distribution and make it fair, while also playing a critical role in validating the transactions between individuals. Starting with this mechanism is a bad way to understand Bitcoin, because its role in establishing value, influencing trust or stabilizing value is greatly overrated.

Continue reading “Bitcoin Primer: Don’t Start with Miners” »

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Cinema goes broadband.

Continue reading “If Movies Had Internet” »

Recently, I was named Most Viewed Writer on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency at Quora.com (writing under the pen name, “Ellery”). I don’t typically mirror posts at Lifeboat, but a question posed today is relevant to my role on the New Money Systems board at Lifeboat. Here, then, is my reply to: “How can governments ban Bitcoin?”

Governments can enact legislation that applies to any behavior or activity. That’s what governments do—at least the legislative arm of a government. Such edicts distinguish activities that are legal from those that are banned or regulated.

You asked: “How can governments ban Bitcoin?” But you didn’t really mean to ask in this way. After all, legislators ban whatever they wish by meeting in a congress or committee and promoting a bill into law. In the case of a monarchy or dictatorship, the leader simply issues an edict.

So perhaps, the real question is “Can a government ban on Bitcoin be effective?”

Continue reading “Can Governments Ban Bitcoin?” »

Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” can reach as far as low earth orbit, and twisted light could boost quantum communication bandwidth.

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Speculations around whether biotech stocks are in a bubble remain undecided for the second year in a row. But one thing stands as indisputable—the field made massive progress during 2015, and faster than anticipated.

For those following the industry in recent years, this shouldn’t come as a surprise.

In fact, according to Adam Feuerstei at The Street, some twenty-eight biotech and drugs stocks grew their market caps to $1 billion or more in 2014, and major headlines like, “Human Genome Sequencing Now Under $1,000 Per Person,” were strewn across the web last year.

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Engineer Robert Grass says that though we believe information is here forever, it’s actually fragile. Hard drives and physical sources of information, like books, decay over time. In a video for the BBC, Grass describes his quest to find a method of preserving information that could be stable for millions of years. The secret is DNA.

In 2012, research showed that you could translate a megabyte (MB) of information into DNA and then read it back again. DNA has a language of its own, and is written in sequences of nucleotides (A, C, T, and G). Think of it as similar to binary, which breaks information down into ones and zeros.

And DNA has the advantage of being able to put an enormous amount of information in a tiny space. Theoretically, one gram of DNA could hold 455 exabytes of information. That’s “enough for all the data held by Google, Facebook and every other major tech company, with room to spare”, according to New Scientist.

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In the “RoboWatch” project at Cornell, researchers let robots search the Internet for online how-to videos to instruct themselves on how to complete certain tasks.

Cornell researchers are using instructional videos off the Internet to teach robots the step-by-step instructions required to perform certain tasks. This ability may become necessary in a future where menial laborer robots – the ones responsible for mundane tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and other household chores – can readily carry out such tasks.

Continue reading “These Robots Learn New Tasks” »

Tim-Berners Lee is often called the inventor of the world wide web because wrote the original proposal for the web and built the first web browser. But in recent years, he’s turned his attention to artificial intelligence.

In a new wide-ranging interview with Campaign Asia, Berners-Lee spoke about the turing test, Ex Machina, and why we should feel nervous about the future of AI.

The pace of AI research is accelerating, Berners-Lee says, but one problem is that lots of current work in the field is done by private companies, which don’t publish their findings. “Most of the work today is completely under wraps,” Berners-Lee said. “We don’t see what companies are working on. AI development is pretty secretive.”

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Are we evolving into new species with hybrid thinking interlinked into the Global Mind? At what point will the Web may become self-aware? Or is it already? Once our neocortices are seamlessly connected to the Web, how will that feel like to step up one level above human consciousness to global consciousness?

In his book “The Global Brain” Howard Bloom argues that humans are a lot like neurons of the “global connectome”, and the coming Internet of Things (IoT) with trillions of sensors around the planet will become effectively the nervous system of Earth.

According to Gaia hypothesis by James Lovelock, we have always been an integral part of this “Meta-Mind”, collective consciousness, global adaptive and self-regulating system while tapping into vast resources of information pooling and at the same time having a “shared hallucination”, we call reality.

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