Greetings, everyone! It's another big week of news about the new economy...so much of it that I'm going to have to save some links for next week's mailing. Enjoy, and feel free to reach out to me anytime at venturealtruist@gmail.com – links, questions, or whatever.
Have a great week!
TRADING & CULTURE
• The absolute best introduction to trading I have ever read:
Welcome to the trading dojo – one of the biggest changes cryptocurrency brings is a democratization of financial literacy and the cool head of professional traders. This is great advice and a solid introduction to trading psychology:
“You can’t start from the wrong premise and hope to come to the right conclusion. How do you learn to see yourself more clearly? Ask questions. What are you good at? What do you suck at? When you fail, why did you fail? Be relentless in answering these questions. Did you over trade? Were you in a bad state of mind? Were you trading drunk? Did you use too much leverage? Were you seeing phantom patterns that don’t exist? Do the patterns even work at all? If so which ones do and which ones don’t?”
• Thoughts on cryptocurrency-induced decentralization:
“Crypto is evolving in its early days in a public way, so it’s messy, and theoretical, and dense. So if you feel like you don’t really understand crypto, join the crowd. Neither of us would have understood much if we sat in the room with Vint Cerf in 1973. I believe, in the future, through smart contracts and the blockchain, decentralized structures will provide life insurance, saving buyers of life insurance the $10’s of billions of tolls (sales commissions, profits, …) that insurance companies takes for sitting in the middle.”
• I never thought I’d live to see Mark Zuckerberg’s crypto-flavored mea culpa:
https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10104380170714571
"One of the most interesting questions in technology right now is about centralization vs decentralization. A lot of us got into technology because we believe it can be a decentralizing force that puts more power in people's hands. (The first four words of Facebook's mission have always been 'give people the power'.) Back in the 1990s and 2000s, most people believed technology would be a decentralizing force. But today, many people have lost faith in that promise. With the rise of a small number of big tech companies — and governments using technology to watch their citizens — many people now believe technology only centralizes power rather than decentralizes it.
There are important counter-trends to this --like encryption and cryptocurrency -- that take power from centralized systems and put it back into people's hands. But they come with the risk of being harder to control. I'm interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in our services. This will be a serious year of self-improvement and I'm looking forward to learning from working to fix our issues together."
INTERESTING PROJECTS
• AI pioneer Ben Goertzel wants to make a blockchain-powered marketplace for AI:
“It’s like having Elance, but the AI is doing a service, not a person.”
“As this gets smarter we are going to point [Hanson Robotics’ robot] Sofia’s brain to SingularityNET, moving it from the Hanson cloud into the SingularityNET, such as using computer vision. We should have some substantial improvements by August next year. We gain from the ability for anyone around the world to improve Sofia’s mind. We can’t hire all these enthusiasts but we can give them an easy way to contribute to Sofia’s mind. So a kid could make millions of dollars form putting their computer vision AI into our market, for instance.”
• The inventor of Firechat wants to make mesh networks from shared encrypted Wi-Fi connections, decentralizing ISPs:
…because, seriously, why do we need 129 wifi routers on one city block?
• IOTA is so cool. Check out their recent AMA to know why I give them my full “sci-fi future I want to live in” vote.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/7orp03/iota_foundation_ask_us_anything_january_7th/
In related IOTA news, they just partnered with the International Transportation Innovation Center:
https://blog.iota.org/iota-partners-with-itic-e83f228a11d9
Creating a “Smart Mobility Simulator” to test out smart charging networks for autonomous vehicles as hosted on the IOTA ledger – dynamic inductive charging and worldwide testbed data marketplace! They’re also setting up an ecosystem fund for the development of related projects.
RANDOM
• A bit of financial astrology: look at “Uranus in Taurus” for an auspicious nod to revolutionary new financial technologies:
http://realitysandwich.com/322542/astrology-to-watch-for-in-2018/
• Hooters gets in on the crypto game…apparently internal corporate tokens are the new loyalty program:
“’Eating a burger is now a way to mine for cryptocoins,’ said Dennis Becker, CEO of Mobivity, the company that's helping Chanticleer jump on the cryptocurrency bandwagon. ‘Every meal enjoyed at any Chanticleer Holdings brand will accrue currency for the consumer that can be used for future meals or traded with other consumers.’…Evidently, the stock market believes that putting these restaurants' reward programs on the blockchain raises their value by around 50 percent.”
• Yes, you CAN use a cryptocurrency mining rig to heat your house. LOL
https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2017/12/25/cryptocurrency-miner-ethereum-heater/
This mining rig is marketed as a plug-and-play unit for newbies...worth checking out if you're eager to get in the game, possibly.
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