The answer may be counter-intuitive: Not only can Bitcoin be widely adopted under a supply cap, its trust and integrity are a direct result of a provably limited supply. As a result, it will flourish because it is capped.
Everyone Can Own and Trade a Limited Commodity, IF…
…if it is both measurable and divisible. Bitcoin has a capped supply just as gold has a capped supply. Although both assets will be mined for some time into the future, there is only so much that will ever be uncovered. Thereafter, the total pie cannot grow.
But the transaction units will continue to grow as needed, because the pie is divisible into very, very tiny units:
There will eventually be 21 million BTC and each coin is divisible into 108 units. This yields (21 million * 100 million), or 21 trillion exchangeable units. And, it can be divided further by consensus.
As Bitcoin is adopted—whether as a simple payment instrument, an investment asset or even as national currencies around the world—each unit of the limited supply simply rises in value. If thought of as a currency, with a value established by supply & demand, it leads to a deflationary economy.
But, Isn’t Deflation Bad for the Economy?
It’s common to associate deflation with economic ills. One need only glance back at the the last century to conclude that deflation coincides with wars, joblessness, recession and a crippling concentration of wealth. Perhaps, just as bad, the tools used to pull a nation out of deflation often force governments to cherry pick beneficiaries of stimulus spending.
But it is important to note that deflation plays no role in causing these things. On the contrary, it is an effect rather than a cause… In fact, when a supply cap is introduced as a designed control input for monetary policy, all sorts of good things follow. I address these in various answers at Quora. Dig in:
Philip Raymond co-chairs Cryptocurrency Standards Association. He was host and producer of The Bitcoin Event in New York. In his spare time, he edits A Wild Duck
Russian Quantum Center (RQC) said that it is ready to collaborate with India and offer its quantum technology that will prevent hackers from breaking into bank accounts. RQC plans to offer ‘quantum cryptography’ that could propel India to the forefront of hack proof communication in sectors such as banking and national and homeland security.
“We are ready to work with Indian colleagues. It (the technology) can’t be bought from the United States as it deals with the government and security,” said Ruslan Yunusov, chief executive at RQC, in an interview.
Established by Russia’s largest global technology hub, Skolkovo in 2010, RQC conducts scientific research that could lead to a new class of technologies. These include developing ‘unbreakable cryptography’ for the banks and the government organisations. It also involves research in areas such as materials with superior properties and new systems for ultrasensitive imaging of the brain. The research is mostly funded by the government money.
“Bankers will become dinosaurs.” #AI article from The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/22/bridgewater-associates-ai-artificial-intelligence-management #Transhumanism
The company is already highly data-driven, with meetings recorded and staff asked to grade each other throughout the day using a ratings system called “dots”. The Systematized Intelligence Lab has built a tool that incorporates these ratings into “Baseball Cards” that show employees’ strengths and weaknesses. Another app, dubbed The Contract, gets staff to set goals they want to achieve and then tracks how effectively they follow through.
These tools are early applications of PriOS, the over-arching management software that Dalio wants to make three-quarters of all management decisions within five years. The kinds of decisions PriOS could make include finding the right staff for particular job openings and ranking opposing perspectives from multiple team members when there’s a disagreement about how to proceed.
The machine will make the decisions, according to a set of principles laid out by Dalio about the company vision.
“It’s ambitious, but it’s not unreasonable,” said Devin Fidler, research director at the Institute For The Future, who has built a prototype management system called iCEO. “A lot of management is basically information work, the sort of thing that software can get very good at.”
At Quora, I occasionally play, “Ask the expert”. Today, I was asked if the difference between quotes at various Bitcoin exchanges presents a profit opportunity.
In addition to my answer, one other cryptocurrency enthusiast offered pithy, one-line response: He said “Buy local, sell internationally and pocket the difference!” I tend to believe the opposite is more likely to generate profit: Buy internationally and sell locally. But, I am getting ahead of myself. Here is my answer [co-published at Quora]…
Question:
A Bitcoin exchange in my country quotes a different rate than
international markets. Can I profit from the price difference?
Answer:
Buying and selling a commodity with the intention of profiting from the difference in price in various markets, regions or exchanges is called arbitrage. Typically, the item must be widely traded and fungible. Although it can be a tangible item (one that must be delivered or stored, like gold, oil, frozen orange juice or soy beans), arbitrage is more practical when applied to an ‘item of account’, such as foreign currency, equity shares, stock futures, or Bitcoin.
With this in mind, Bitcoin qualifies as a fungible item of account. If you see a different price at vaious exchanges (or if you believe that you can source personal sales at a higher price than the market spot price), then you have found an opportunity for arbitrage. But hold on! It is not so easy…
I am neither an arbitrage player nor a day trader. These are just a few warning bells that come to mind when I think about such activity. You can be sure that this list of risks only scratches the surface. Bitcoin is remarkably fluid and many people flaunt regulations. For this reason, I am confident that opportunities for profitable arbitrage are rare and very tiny (small gain for a big risk).
Have I scared you away from Bitcoin arbitrage? If not, proceed with extreme caution and don’t bet the family ranch! Once you have some experience, come back and post feedback below. I have dabbled in options arbitrage, but never with Bitcoin or any currency. Since I don’t have first-hand experience, your feedback will be appreciated.
Philip Raymond is co-chair of Cryptocurrency Standards Association,
host of The Bitcoin Event (New York), and editor at A Wild Duck.
Nice write up and references the Cognitive Toolkit that was leveraged on Skype, Xbox, etc. Also, a nice plug on the QC work.
“Only Cray can bring the combination of supercomputing technologies, supercomputing best practices, and expertise in performance optimization to scale deep learning problems,” said Dr. Mark S. Staveley, Cray’s director of deep learning and machine learning. “We are working to unlock possibilities around new approaches and model sizes, turning the dreams and theories of scientists into something real that they can explore. Our collaboration with Microsoft and CSCS is a game changer for what can be accomplished using deep learning.”
Also Read: Ignore The Financials, MSFT Stock Is Headed Higher : Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT)
“Cray’s proficiency in performance analysis and profiling, combined with the unique architecture of the XC systems, allowed us to bring deep learning problems to our [system] and scale them in a way that nobody else has,” added Prof. Dr. Thomas C. Schulthess, director of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). “What is most exciting is that our researchers and scientists will now be able to use our existing Cray XC supercomputer to take on a new class of deep learning problems that were previously infeasible.”
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Our society has never aged more rapidly – one of the most visible symptoms of the changing demographics is the exponential increase in the incidence of age-related diseases, including cancer, cardiovascular diseases and osteoarthritis. Not only does aging have a negative effect on the quality of life among the elderly but it also causes a significant financial strain on both private and public sectors. As the proportion of older people is increasing so is health care spending. According to a WHO analysis, the annual number of new cancer cases is projected to rise to 17 million by 2020, and reach 27 million by 2030. Similar trends are clearly visible in other age-related diseases such as cardiovascular disease. Few effective treatments addressing these challenges are currently available and most of them focus on a single disease rather than adopting a more holistic approach to aging.
Recently a new approach which has the potential of significantly alleviating these problems has been validated by a number of in vivo and in vitro studies. It has been demonstrated that senescent cells (cells which have ceased to replicate due to stress or replicative capacity exhaustion) are linked to many age-related diseases. Furthermore, removing senescent cells from mice has been recently shown to drastically increase mouse healthspan (a period of life free of serious diseases).
Here at CellAge we are working hard to help translate these findings into humans!
CellAge, together with a leading synthetic biology partner, Synpromics, is going to develop synthetic promoters which are specific to senescent cells (SeneSENSE), as promoters that are currently being used to track senescent cells are simply not good enough to be used in therapies. The most prominently used p16 gene promoter has a number of limitations, for example. As our primary mission is to expand the interface between synthetic biology and aging research as well as drive translational research forward, we will offer senescence reporter assay to academics for free. We predict that in the very near future this assay will be also used as a quality control step in the cell therapy manufacturing process to make cell therapies safer!
As our secondary goal, we will focus on validating gene therapies for senescent cell eradication (SeneHEALTH) – initially for patients with progeroid syndromes, then for patients who underwent radiotherapy (during which the number of senescent cells are increased) or developed age-related disease and eventually for healthy individuals.
