Former NASA engineer and Bitcoin advocate Beth Moses says she got a birds-eye view of humanity from outer space when she became the world’s first woman commercial astronaut earlier this year. Part of a three-person flight team, Moses soared 55.87 miles (89.9 kilometers) into orbit as a “test passenger” aboard Virgin Galactic’s second spaceflight on February 22.
An early proponent of Bitcoin, she began mining BTC after she read Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper in 2013. As Virgin Galactic’s chief astronaut instructor and interiors program manager, Moses believes global tools can solve critical problems.
Owning one full bitcoin is becoming a recognized attainment goal. And thereby hangs a tale.
Is it just a numbers game? Isn’t the unit a bit arbitrary and meaningless?…
The logistics and the math are compelling. I recognized the importance of reaching this personal milestone more than 8 years ago. But I was a nobody. No one cared. Then, in April 2019, we started to see articles in legitimate venues about this concept—and articulated in exactly this way. I borrowed the title of this post from this article in Medium.
Who Says So?
In the Before Time, the drum beat came from me, Charlie Shrem and Andreas Antonopoulos. In the Middle Age, Tim Draper, Craig Wright and the Winklevoss twins contributed to the siren call. But in the Modern Era (the past few days), it has become a mainstream mantra. Coinbase CEO, Brian Armstrong, added his voice to the idea that owning one full Bitcoin is not just an exercise in numerology.
“For better or worse, I do think owning one whole Bitcoin will increasingly become a big deal. Only 21M will ever be produced. Some people already own much more than one.”
—Brian Armstrong, Aug 25 2019
“If you own 1 BTC, you are mathematically guaranteed to be top 3/1000 richest in the world, in BTC terms. (21m / 7B).”
—Changpeng Zhao, Aug 25 2019
“If you own 0.28 BTC and HODL, you can be certain no more than 1% of the current world’s population can EVER own more BTC than you. A modest investment of $1,830 today can ensure you are a 1%er in a future Bitcoin world.”
“If Bitcoin succeeds, 1 Bitcoin may be worth more than $1 million in 7 to 10 years.”
— Wences Casares, CEO of Xapo; PayPal Board of Directors
Despite getting religion early on, I have mixed feelings about this. The investor mindset— HODL, flipping and converting to Fiat—is the biggest threat to adoption, ubiquity, fluidity and utility. Currently, 98% of all transactions are driven by people buying or selling bitcoin, rather than using bitcoin to buy lettuce, a new SUV or a family vacation. That’s the problem. Bitcoin will fail to gain mainstream appeal and adoption until the fraction of transactions driven by purchase & sale, salary, debt payment, real-estate and buying groceries dwarfs the fraction driven by traders or conversion into and from Fiat.
Yet, it is impossible to resist the lure of a deflationary commodity during the early adoption era. The supply cap and adoption math clearly points to a rising unit value. What is the point in having the capacity and foresight to recognize a new technology or a radically transformative paradigm if you cannot treat it as an investment asset, while waiting for adoption?
I don’t know how we will push through the chicken-and-egg problem of volatility–utility–adoption–ubiquity. But I am confident that Bitcoin will ultimately reign supreme—not just as a payment instrument—but as a store of value and a leading international currency.
For now, this opinion is still in the minority. Otherwise a commodity with only 18 million units in circulation would have a far higher value than the current exchange rate. It is from this certainty and disparity that opportunity arises.
For those that don’t quite get Bitcoin, owning one full bitcoin seems like an arbitrary goal to achieve. After all, it is a useless token that can be imitated by other—better—cryptos. To these folks, Bitcoin is a fad, a fools gold, or an outright scam.
Do you own a whole Bitcoin? Few will own more than a fraction
What they don’t get is the legitimate, organic, two-sided network that buttresses bitcoin and no other currency. A new-age intrinsic value that surpasses the utility & scarcity of gold, but with benefits that outstrip gold and fiat. The inherent value and the pillars that support value are unlikely to be eroded or transferred, even during periods of technical crisis, hacking or regulatory hysteria.
If something better than Bitcoin comes along, two things will happen to ensure supremacy:
Improvements will be folded into Bitcoin. After all, a trusted crypto is open source, transparent and license free. The leader can snag any feature or improvement.
If another chit is more fluid, flexible, friction free or private, Bitcoin will remain the background reserve through which other “instruments” derive value. This is already occurring.
So, should you buy into the hype? Should you accumulate one full bitcoin while you still can? At the risk of obnoxious immodesty, here is one more quote. Add it to the list at the top of this article. Then, decide for yourself!
“The handwriting is on the wall. Popular adoption is a work in progress. But it is, nevertheless, fait accompli. This handwriting is indelible.”
The astronaut training billionaire Richard Branson to be the first passenger on Virgin Galactic has seen the Earth from 56 miles away. Now, the long-time bitcoin advocate wants to share what she saw: how blockchain and other technologies are enabling a borderless world.
Is an American biochemist and cell biologist. She is a professor of biogerontology at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. She is also a member of the SENS Research Foundation Advisory Board and an adviser at the Lifeboat Foundation. She is co-editor in chief of the Aging Journal, together with Mikhail Blagosklonny and David Sinclair, and founder of the pharmaceutical company Unity Biotechnology. She is listed in Who’s Who in Gerontology.
She is widely known for her research on how senescent cells influence aging and cancer — in particular the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP).
Judy Campisi, The Buck Institute for Research on Aging, presenting at Undoing Aging 2019.
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UNICEF is looking for startups applying #datascience, #machinelearning, #blockchain or #XR to prepare young people for the jobs of tomorrow.
The UNICEF Innovation Fund is looking to make up to 100K equity-free investments to provide early stage (seed) finance to for-profit technology start-ups that have the potential to benefit humanity.
If you’ve got a start-up using machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain or extended reality, registered in one of UNICEF’s programme countries, and have a working, open source prototype (or you are willing to make it open-source) showing promising results, the UNICEF Innovation Fund is looking for you.
We turn our attention to the three-part “big reveal” of Satoshi Nakamoto and his 980,000 Bitcoin holding which is turning out to be nothing but a CIA Ponzi scheme. Listen to Betsy and Thomas explain why all of this is a hoax and read the” Satoshi Dossier” yourself. https://patriots4truth.org/2019/08/19/satoshi-nakamoto-dossier-reveals-cia-ponzi-scheme/
If you currently own cryptos, this is an audio that we highly recommend.
Join us on the frontline of truth revelation at: www.aim4truth.org, www.truthbits.blog, and patriots4truth.org.
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Bitcoin offered the first smart contract programming language the world had ever seen. Script, as this language is called, lets users encode different conditions under which coins can be spent. But while this was a revolutionary concept, it’s not easy to use, especially for more complex spending conditions. Both writing a complex contract as well as verifying that the contract does what it is supposed to do are prone to human error. Yet, especially with money at stake, correct interpretation of the conditions is of the utmost importance.
Over the past year, three blockchain engineers have set out to improve this. By stripping down Script to its bare essentials, their “new” programming language — “Miniscript” — abstracts away the complexity and should make programming on Bitcoin easier and safer for everyone involved.
“Miniscript is, in a theoretical sense, more limiting than script,” Blockstream director of research and Miniscript co-designer Andrew Poelstra told Bitcoin Magazine. “But it can do everything that people actually use script for.”
Metallicus, the startup behind the peer-to-peer payments platform Metal Pay, received an undisclosed angel investment from the youngest bitcoin millionaire, Erik Finman.
In partnership with Metal Pay CEO Marshall Hayner, the two look to develop the first “all-in-one” cryptocurrency banking platform, which includes a 17 digital asset exchange, a digital bank and a payments application with social features similar to Venmo.
Founded in September, Metal Pay has processed approximately $11 million in total payments from nearly 130,000 registered users across 38 states. On a monthly basis, the company processes $1 million in crypto or fiat for around 30,000 active users, according to Hayner.
NEW YORK, Aug. 16, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — After a decade of anonymity, Satoshi Nakamoto will break his silence in Part I of his “My Reveal” Sunday, Aug. 18, at 4 p.m. EDT on the Satoshi Nakamoto Renaissance Holdings website, www.SatoshiNRH.com, and the Ivy McLemore & Associates website, www.ivymclemore.com.
Blockchain startup BitFury launched an artificial intelligence (AI) unit, Reuters reports on Aug. 13.
“Data is the new oil”
Bitfury chief executive officer and co-founder Valery Vavilov reportedly said that the company’s dive into AI is motivated by the need to analyze and extract information from great quantities of data. He reportedly noted that data is becoming the new oil and stated:
