During the last couple of months, bitcoin has had numerous ups and downs, yet the number of total investors has increased exponentially. Judging by this practice, it seems like there is a clear demand for the digital currency. In fact, the year of 2015 represented the year of venture capitalists, especially on the blockchain, after the number of investments in both bitcoin and its underlying technology has increased. As there is clearly some risk associated with the practice of trading and investing in bitcoin, numerous potential investors are staying away from it.

 

The supply of bitcoin is fixed

Since the currency was first released back in 2009, its value has increased from next to nothing, up to 1,100 and its current value of around $600 at the time of writing. However, not many people are aware of the fact that the digital currency has a strict, limited maximum supply, of 21 million coins. Judging by this aspect, once all of the coins will have been mined, the coin will have the potential to increase in value a lot. While it will surely go through numerous more price fluctuations until the limit is reached, if the number of investors and adopters of the digital currency continues to increase, then this will likely bring the value of one bitcoin to astronomical numbers.

 

A larger number of individuals and businesses are turning to bitcoin

While the digital currency was still fairly new, numerous businesses had started accepting bitcoin as a form of payment. As time passed, however, other companies began paying their salaries in the digital currency, whereas others simply stopped using fiat and just moved to bitcoin altogether.

 

Bitcoin is entering a trend where it’s being adopted for more and more practical reasons

Using the digital currency as a form of payment only is surely beneficial. Yet, adopting it for its practical reasons can yield much better results over the years to come. To put things better into perspective, with each day, bitcoin is getting more ingrained in our society. Thanks to this, it’s also being built within the back bone of numerous products and services. Judging by this trend, companies and individuals will need more of the digital currency to take part in the online and offline markets with ease.

 

When it comes down to moving to a digital currency, most people choose bitcoin

As it is by far the most popular cryptocurrency available on the market, it yields an impressive advantage to new-comers. Based on this, people who are just getting started with the world of digital currencies are much more likely to invest in bitcoin, rather than other altcoins such as Ethereum, Litecoin, Dogecoin etc.

 

Higher prices increase transaction volumes, which in turn boost prices even more

This is an interesting trend in the world of bitcoin, thus creating a circle of benefits for its adopters. With this in mind, as soon as the price increases, trading data has shown that the number of transactions increase as well, which in turn, act as a catalyst for higher prices. In case no event shakes the world of bitcoin, then this could lead to a continuous price increase, which would further be boosted after reaching the limit of coins, as mentioned above.

 

Governments take it lightly

While there have been a couple of government talks on regularizing bitcoin and the use of the blockchain alongside with other digital currencies, no harsh practice has been imposed so far, apart from 2-4 countries. Most governmental agencies are open to the use of the digital currency, whereas others even encourage it (the United Kingdom, for example). Taxes have been imposed on both individuals and businesses in the past, yet many of these regions decided to remove the taxing, and regard bitcoin as a commodity, asset, whereas others talked about it as real money.

 

It’s easy

Chances are that the most pragmatic reason on why you should consider investing in bitcoin, is that doing so, is extremely easy. To put things better into perspective, it could be as easy as simply buying a number of coins, and holding onto them through the price fluctuations. Of course, there are also slightly more difficult practices that you could get into, such as trading, which can turn out to be extremely profitable, especially if you have some experience as a trader. Practices such as margin trading, lending bitcoin, and simply speculating on the price can result in higher profits for those who do this constantly, and have a good judgment of the short and long-term future.

 

Based on everything that has been outlined so far, the 6 reasons mentioned above, should have convinced you about the profit potential that bitcoin offers, and should have encouraged you to consider the idea of investing. There are of course, also a couple of disadvantages, which we will cover in the next articles to come. Based on everything that has been outlined so far, what do you personally think about the reasons mentioned above? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.

Conventional thinking about blockchain technology's use in stock markets may be wrong, according to one academic.

The argument was put forward by Professor David Yermack, chairman of the finance department at New York University, this week at Imperial College London's first FinTech-focused academic conference.
There, Yermack presented an unpublished report that argues blockchains will evolve differently in capital markets than widely expected. For example, according to Yermack, functions such as stock settlements will one day be carried out on public blockchains like bitcoin, as opposed to private or premissioned alternatives.

Overall, Yermack, who teaches a cryptocurrency course at NYU’s Stern School of Business, offered a much broader vision for the use of blockchain in finance than what the industry is considering, as well as more critical takes on how incumbents are exploring the tech. Taking a dig at DTCC, for instance, Yermack said its report "Embracing Disruption" did little to show or illustrate how blockchain could change the current state of affairs.

Agents of change
That's not to say that Yermack didn't take a measured view of public blockchains. On the contrary, Yermak acknowledged the limitations of bitcoin's throughput and its proof-of-work consensus system today, but noted that it's something he believes the industry will need to work out better solutions for.

Still, he insisted that the future of finance will be brought about by a real decentralized blockchains that don’t have monopolies that guard access to stocks, bonds and currencies. Speaking of the direction where the disruption will come from, Yermack sees three potential players. These include challengers (complete outsiders looking for disruption); collaborators (like the DTCC and R3); and regulators (countries like the UK, Australia, and Canada).

Overall, he believes that the challengers were the most likely to succeed, but that some regulators (like those in the UK) are better positioned to bring about change than others.

Quick wins
Interestingly, Yermack believes one of the easiest and quickest ways for the industry to move to a blockchain model is by exploring use cases in corporate elections by shareholders, an avenue already being pursued by Nasdaq. Yermack said shareholder voting on corporate elections is currently inefficient when it comes to vote counting, and that the voting results are often plus or minus 5% of what they should be.

Further, in the current model, there are many challenges when it comes to corporate elections, he said. There are various different ledgers of ownership, maintained by the company, the broker, and the market in general, which gives rise to different voting results. Broadridge, which has what he called "a monopoly that is very inefficient" administers corporate elections voting, is also interested in blockchains.

But, Yermack went beyond words, showing that corporate elections are prone to favor management proposals. Such issues, he believes, could be eliminated with the help of blockchain-based voting systems.

NAV's coin swap to set off a chain of game changing improvements
"The goal of the NAV coin swap is to improve the performance of NAV for it's investors and give us the code base to launch NAV into a strong future. Our future will be development heavy; we pride NAV on being a tech strong coin and we like keep on the cutting edge of altcion technology – after all we are nerds."

 Bip 32 is considered one of the key updates in moving crypto currencies forward into a modern user-friendly place. It is the capability to generate wallet addressed from a single private seed, which allows the user to regenerate key pairs from the seed if the wallet is lost. Thus back up frequency is reduced. This wallet generation method is compliant with web & mobile wallet standards. The NAV team has indicated the a mobile and web wallet build is high on their list of priorities.

Bip 38 -passphrase protected private key
Bip 38 is the capability to encrypt and encode a passphrase protected private key; typically intended for use on paper wallets and physical coins. Users will now have the option of passphrase encrypted secure offline storage.

Bip 100 – floating block size hard unit
Bip 100 increase the maximum block size to 20MB, and the maximum size for mined blocks to 10MB.  The Block size will be dynamic and change in response to the volume of transactions. This future proofs the coin to be capable of handling all the perceived future transaction volumes.

 

At this moment in time, Ethereum represents the basis of a popular digital currency, alongside with a decentralized platform meant to support apps that run as they are, without facing censorship, fraud or any form of third part interference.

 

However, during its reign so far, the network was forced to implement a hard fork, to prevent the theft of millions of dollars’ worth of DAO funds, after the systems had been hacked. Whenever a fork is suggested on the digital currency market, its purpose is to divide the supporters of two different ideas, and continue the branch which has the most supporters at the time of the fork.

 

Recent reports indicate that after the recent DDoS attack, Ethereum is planning to carry out another fork, in order to deal with the EIP150 gas cost changes being implemented. With this in mind, last month, on the 22nd of September, Ethereum representatives announced that the network was facing a strong DDoS attack, thus causing an immediate slow0down of the network. As the attacks have been quite crafty when it came down to finding vulnerabilities in the client implementations and protocol specifications, the only way to prevent future attacks like this would be to carry out a reparatory hard fork.

To prepare the network for its second hard fork, Ethereum made a couple of announcements, including:

 

To help minimize the effects of the recent attack, miners are encouraged to lower their gas limit to a total of 500k gas.

Once the fork is launched based on the EIP 150, version 1C, it will be put in effect starting with the block 2463000, thus repricing a couple of operations, and making them better respond to their particular computational complexity.

A second fork will be carried out moments later, right after revering the state-bloat that has been caused by the attacks. This one will also remove all accounts which are empty, lack code and have a balance and storage of 0.

It’s worth keeping in mind the fact that consensus for this hard fork has been reached, and that the Go Ethereum client will be released quite soon. The hard fork code has been kept under development during the last few days, and is currently facing testing and reviews. Once everything is confirmed as working properly, the Ethereum network will begin the hard fork, thus repairing the damage caused by the hackers. Fortunately, consensus is met this time, which means that another Ethereum Classic network won’t be brought back to life.

 

Once the hard fork is issued, the entire network is most likely to upgrade in the next 2-3 days. Although some bugs may be present for a while longer, each of them should be taken care of.

 

Based on everything that has been outlined so far, what do you personally think about the newest Ethereum hard fork? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.

The human brain, consisting of roughly 86 billion neurons, rivals the world’s best supercomputers in terms of magnitude, efficiency, and speed, using as little energy as a small 20-watt light bulb. Human evolution took tens of thousands of years to adapt noticeable brain size and architecture changes.

 

Evolution is a slow process that can take eons for changes to occur. Technology, on the other hand, is amazing in terms of how fast it is moving along, blending into the world seamlessly. The technological evolution notably occurs at a faster pace compared to biological evolution.

 

To further understand the situation, imagine a frog in a pot of water that heats up 1/10th of a degree Celsius every ten seconds. Even if the frog remained in that water for, say an hour, it would be unable to feel the minute changes in temperature. However, if the frog is dropped into boiling water, the change is too sudden and the frog jumps away to avoid fate.

 

 

Let's take a gigantic chessboard and a grain of rice, for scale, and place each grain of rice to a corresponding chess square following a sequence: for each passing square, we double the amount. Upon applying this, we get:

 

1) 1

2) 2

3) 4

4) 8

 

And so on. You must be thinking, “What difference does doubling a grain of rice for every box make?” But one must remember that, at some point, the number from which the count started will be totally indistinguishable to the end result. Still on the 41th square, it contains a mountainous 1 trillion grains of rice pile.

 

41) 1,099,511,627,776

 

What started out as a measly amount, barely feeding a single ant, has become massive enough to feed a city of 100,000 people for a year.

 

 

The development of technology over time

In the year 1959, the global output of transistor production of 60 million was huge. It was deemed a manufacturing achievement to produce such an amount. Although looking at the world today, it pales because of how far the transistor development has come. A modern i7 Skylake processor contains around

 

(Skip to 5:15 in the video, to hear the global transistor manufacturing achievement in 1959)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2466CBuOxVg

 

1,750,000,000 transistors. It would take 29 years of 1959’s transistor global production to match one i7 Skylake transistor count.

 

The transistor manufacturing size in an i7 Skylake processor is 14 nm. For reference, a silicon atom is about 0.1176 nm across: 14/0.1176=119 Meaning, a transistor in an i7 Skylake processor is only about 119 atoms across.

 

Therefore, one can conclude that it takes technology to build technology. In the past, civilization was limited to the usage of paper and writing. Calculations done by hand tend to be slow and tedious.

 

 

Whyfuture.com - Lets think about the future

Artifical Intelligence - Artificial Intelligence & Ethics on the Road to Superintelligence

Beijing and Shanghai, China's two most populous and developed cities, are often reminiscent of two siblings. They are similar, but each has its own distinct character.

In this light, some rivalry is as inevitable, and it's now spilling over into the country's blockchain industry.

In Beijing, visitors are likely to meet "bitcoin maximalists", those who shrug at the idea an alternative blockchain or bank consortium could challenge the network effect of a $10bn digital economy. In Shanghai, the difference of attitude is pronounced – there, you are more likely to be told that bitcoin is passé. Metaverse, a company based in the Shanghai's Huangpu district, is in many ways representative of the city's new blockchain startups.

Relatively unknown even in its home country, Metaverse has over 20 employees – no small feat for a blockchain startup that has been around for less than a year, and it recently held a blockchain token crowdsale, raising over ¥10m within weeks. The sight of a roomful of busy developers gives the impression the startup is onto something big – which is exactly what Eric Gu, CEO and co-founder, wanted to convey in interview. But he is also candid about his personal transition and what it says about the state of the blockchain industry.

According to Gu, support from local officials is strongest when they are presented with a project that he said avoids the revolutionary stigma that has surrounded bitcoin. "If you expect the government to back a blockchain project, it will at least be one that they feel more comfortable with," Gu explained.

Not quite a battle
Meanwhile, in Beijing, the city's outlook is defined by the notable startups that call it home, including bitcoin mining giant Bitmain and major exchanges like OKCoin and Huobi. Da Hongfei, CEO of Shanghai-based Onchain, argues that this has made for "a very different community and industry landscape" in each city. The creator of a "universal" blockchain platform that aims at adoption in both public and private markets, he acknowledges his firm would be an outsider in this location. "Beijing is well-known as an established bitcoin center. It enjoys a comprehensive bitcoin ecosystem," he acknowledged.

Like Metaverse, Onchain has also differentiated from the venture-backed startup model common in Beijing, raising more than $4.5m in a public token sale, while inking a partnership with Microsoft and contributing to the Linux-led Hyperledger project. By contrast, Beijing firms have often elected foreign venture capital over the token sale model, sometimes called an initial coin offering (ICO), whereby unaccredited investors back a firm by purchasing cryptographic assets.

Despite this investor approval (and the heated debate around ICOs), Da went on to argue there is still a greater "stigma" associated with bitcoin, one his company has sidestepped. "As for blockchain technology, or DLT, a large extent, it's free from this burden," he said.

Trend or fad
But as for which brand of blockchain is winning, it might be too early to say. Da, for example, hinted he believes other cities are now following Shanghai's lead, in what could be a sign its view on the technology could win out. "Hangzhou is taking the lead in the lower-layer, distributed ledger technology R&D," he said, "not necessarily everything bitcoin."

Companies seem to be following their lead, as well. Metaverse, for instance, is utilizing this strength to tackle the country's collectable calligraphy and painting market, where collectors have been searching for tools to enable them to record their transactions and check previous ownership of art pieces to ensure authenticity. Onchain, on the other hand, is working with Everbright Bank, a major Chinese commercial bank, to build a blockchain-based reputation point system. Both projects see value in enterprise markets, particularly because there have been strong signals of interest from leading domestic firms.

In this way, Da argued that he believes "blockchain" might bring about the most benefits for Chinese consumers, though he sought to stress that there's a larger, more important goal that unites innovators in both Shanghai and Beijing, in bitcoin and blockchain.

 

Blockchain is almost always right, and has an incredible number of associated opportunities – from storage, to coding, and far beyond. The most popular and supported example is the Ethereum smart contract, which has revolutionized the coding and cryptocurrency world forever. It showed thousands that crypto isn’t just for payments, but for coders and programmers alike. With so many choices, programmers or cryptocoiners may be wondering – what’s so great about the blockchain? In this article, we have all the information you need so you can make your own decision.

 

Blockchain has many pros – the fact that data can be stored on it is a huge one. A notable example is in the very beginnings of Bitcoin – the genesis block. What’s interesting about this specific block is that it doesn’t reference any other block, because there were not any blocks to reference, and so it has a lot of zero bytes. All blocks have a special section called the coinbase, which is the area that is capable of storing the actual data.

 

Blockchain isn’t only present in Bitcoin, though; Ethereum is another notable example, with smart contracts that can execute any input code for a small fee. This allows for elaborate plans and security check systems to be put in place. The fact that those lines of code cannot be interfered with is also amazing. Coding isn’t the only pro with cryptocurrency, however; the blockchain can also support transfer of funds, which is what most people are familiar with. Funds can be transferred using blocks, which are mined. They also have a set difficulty to control blocktime, and with a low enough difficulty, funds can be transferred almost instantaneously. The blocks also create a ‘confirmation’ system that makes sure double-spends, which are discussed below, don’t occur. This means that the blockchain not only offers permanent storage of code, but also of funds. Nothing like this has ever been created prior to the creation of cryptocurrencies.

 

Now onto the cons: we’ll only cover double-spending here, which is a huge disadvantage. Double spending is the reversal of a transaction to another address, and is a huge factor as to why confirmations are required with most bitcoin-based payment systems. There are lots of double-spends happening, but fortunately, most are very minor and only deal with a few cents. This is still an issue, however, and will likely never disappear completely. Confirmations do help prevent this, but it’s still not a guarantee.

 

With these listed cons and pros, we hope we’ve provided you an accurate view of blockchain. Nothing is perfect, but the system keeps improving and gets better every day.

 

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