On this “Speaking of Bitcoin” episode, join hosts Adam B. Levine, Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Stephanie Murphy, and Jonathan Mohan for a look at the past, present and future of global reserve currencies
In the beginning (way back in 2009) there was the global reserve currency (U.S. dollars,) national currencies like the Japanese Yen, alternative currencies like Ithaca hours and just one cryptocurrency, Bitcoin.
But what a difference a decade can make, today there are thousands of cryptocurrencies, many created by enthusiasts who have ideas on how to make something even better than bitcoin, but also currencies that use some of the technology that makes Bitcoin so powerful, but which pairs it with the authority of a national government, like the Digital Yuan in China, the Digital Euro out of Brussels, or even a globe-spanning corporation with billions of customers like the Libra, backed by Facebook.
In this emerging picture, is bitcoin still interesting? First attempts at new technologies, even when successful at introducing a powerful new idea, are often not the ones which eventually succeeds in changing everything. And importantly, as the world changes and we get closer to something other than the dollar standard, where does bitcoin fit?
Record number of large companies lose money during the pandemic
JPMorgan releases research note on bitcoin
Our main discussion: Stone Ridge Holdings Group discloses $114 million in bitcoin treasury assets.
NLW digs into what Stone Ridge is, why it spun off New York Digital Investments Group (NYDIG) and how the company has quietly built itself into a serious player in the institutional crypto asset space.
Our main discussion: The world’s central banks are moving quickly on digital currencies. NLW looks at a slew of recent news showing how much of a priority CBDCs are becoming:
A report from the Bank for International Settlements and seven other central banks setting design principles for CBDCs
A G20 regulatory standards framework
A forthcoming OECD tax reporting framework
One need only look at the increasingly speedy rollout of China’s DCEP to understand why this has become a major priority for central banks everywhere.
On this “Speaking of Bitcoin” episode, join hosts Adam B. Levine, Stephanie Murphy, Jonathan Mohan and special guest Martin Rerak, creator of AllYourFeeds.com, for a look at how “AI curation” is being used to figure out what’s useful information and what’s just fluff.
In the early days of Bitcoin, there were just a few places you might go to read news and stay informed, but over the years things have changed dramatically. Today there are thousands of projects and hundreds of articles written each day. And that’s assuming you ignore the wilds of YouTube or the depths of crypto Twitter.
There were days I was waking up to a hundred tabs that I was basically just reloading from the prior day... You know, looking at Slack, Telegram, Twitter accounts, Discord, Reddit and dozens of publications online [...] It was very easy to point somebody in the [right] direction if they're saying, "Where can I buy cryptocurrency?" But if they were saying, "Is there a use case here for traceability?" or "What do you think I should invest in?" or "How is this project developing?" that becomes a lot more loaded and challenging... - Martin Rerak
In this episode, we discuss the crypto-media landscape, AI training, the challenges around bias and un-biasing practices, potential impacts of the natural-language-generating algorithm known as GPT-3 and more.
Biased AI
While unsettling on the surface, the idea of bias within an AI is not as controversial as you might imagine – it’s almost required. As humans, we each have our own experiences and preferences which shape our viewpoint and our biases. Modern artificial intelligence consumes “training material” curated by humans to learn what’s right or wrong for its particular task. Once trained, AI can help us with those tasks and is at its most useful when it’s “instincts” match whomever it is working on behalf of.
Of course whether bias is good or bad depends a lot of your priorities. When Google trained an AI to help with hiring, the data around past and current employees led it to believe that an ideal “Google engineer” wouldn’t have a woman’s college on their academic transcript. For Google, their past records did not match their future ambitions and so bias was a problem.
But personally, I’ve developed patent-pending AI technology that assists with audio editing, and here the idea of bias is critical. There is no objective standard of what sounds best, only personal preferences. For an AI to assist an audio editor, it must be in tune with those preferences and be able to make decisions that are objectively correct for the person it is assisting.
This is much the same with AI assisted news curation. We all have our own preferences, interests and biases which help us decide what we do or don’t care about. On today’s show we dig into this fascinating topic where one size rarely fits all and the future is wide open.
In it, Lyn argues that bitcoin’s correlation patterns are, in part, reliant on where bitcoin finds itself in its own cycles of expansion or consolidation.
The virtual event invest: ethereum economy takes place on Wednesday, Oct. 14. CoinDesk’s Christine Kim spoke to colleagues Michael J. Casey and Aaron Stanley about the most compelling and under-discussed topics about Ethereum 2.0 headlining next week’s conference.
From the dynamics of staking to the architecture of sharding, there haven’t been many topics Ethereum 2.0 core developers have shied away from discussing over the past five weeks on “Developer Perspectives: Ethereum 2.0.”
Each discussion, however, has sparked new questions about the ramifications of Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake on the crypto markets and the broader blockchain industry.
“There’s a lot of unanswered questions about how the markets are going to behave,” said Casey, CoinDesk’s chief content officer. “Do we end up with a split, [with] two versions of ethereum or at least two tokens that trade differently in the marketplace?”
Casey added that financial engineers in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space will likely seek to unlock the liquidity of staked ETH on Ethereum 2.0 before token transfers are officially enabled on the network. What new DeFi products are created, their attributes and, most important, their impact on the value of ETH remain to be determined.
Along with lingering questions over how the markets will react to the launch of Ethereum 2.0, there’s also uncertainty over how the launch will affect the competitive landscape for dapp users and dapp developers in the crypto industry.
“What does the multi-chain future look like?” asked Stanley, CoinDesk’s managing director of events content. “If Eth 2.0 succeeds, … what does that mean for all these other [smart contract] chains out there? Are they going to go away or just cease to exist? I don’t think that’s the case.”
With the recent popularity around yield farming and liquidity mining on Ethereum, Stanley also questioned what the real incentives are for users holding large amounts of ETH, upwards of $11,000 worth, to stake on Ethereum 2.0 when they could earn “100x returns farming ‘hotdog coin’ or whatever the meme coin of the day is.”
These questions are pertinent to the discussions happening next Wednesday at invest: ethereum economy. Keynote speakers headlining the virtual conference are founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin and U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Heath P. Tarbert. To register for the event, click here.
CoinDesk Research has recently published an updated report about the launch of Ethereum 2.0, as well as recent developments on the existing Ethereum blockchain. Download it for free on the CoinDesk Research Hub.
