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Tag: cryptocurrency

  • Credible Crypto

    Credible Crypto

  • Theranos’s Holmes VC Reverb | 5G C-Band Marches On | Mozilla Jumps Shark

    Theranos’s Holmes VC Reverb | 5G C-Band Marches On | Mozilla Jumps Shark

    Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

    This week: The conviction of Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes leads to greater scrutiny of startups, higher-frequency 5G NR is creeping towards reality, and Mozilla gets criticized for promoting climate-harming scams.

    1. Holmes Case Causes Valley Rethink?

    First up this week: Elizabeth Holmes has been found guilty of defrauding Theranos investors. But how will the affair change Silicon Valley’s startup-and-funding culture?

    Analysis: Don’t fake it—just make it.

    This could be a seminal moment, causing investors to look more closely at startup founders and their outlandish promises. On the other hand, key Theranos investors—e.g., Murdoch, Cox, DeVoss—hardly fit the mold of Silicon Valley VCs.

    David Streitfeld: The Epic Rise and Fall

    F. Scott Fitzgerald’s creation … Jay Gatsby … was a bootlegger [and] sold fake bonds. Ms. Holmes chose Silicon Valley, the last and greatest of all human dreams. [She] was a natural salesperson, as good at bending reality as Steve Jobs himself.
    …
    She and her deputy and boyfriend, Ramesh Balwani … thought they could brazen it out in the Silicon Valley tradition until they had something that actually worked. [But] the verdict signaled the end of an era. In Silicon Valley, where the line between talk and achievement is often vague, there is finally a limit. … It is an epic rise and fall that will be chewed over in the coffee shops and juice bars of Palo Alto, Calif., until the tech industry departs [for] off-world colonies.
    …
    So where does this conviction leave … her investors and former fans? Ripe for the next huckster that comes along, probably. Some Silicon Valley promises are so sweet we just can’t get enough of them. Immortality. Crypto. Flying cars. Mars. Digital harmony. Wealth beyond compare.


    Think different, thinks DeanonymizedCoward:

    [There’s a] fine line between bombastic marketing spam, “fake it ’til you make it” pitches, and outright fraud. … The first is repugnant and sometimes unethical, but generally legal.
    …
    [But] If your product requires bull**** to get funded—even if it ultimately works—you’re a fraud. … Regulatory reforms … and a sort of corporate death penalty … can fix a lot of this by making it less financially practical to engage in ****ty behavior.


    Who else is to blame? Ask DS999:

    I am sure some of her investors didn’t really care whether it worked. They just wanted to get in early, ride the hype train up, and sell before actual results mattered.

    2. FAA and 5G Carriers Kiss and Make Up

    Higher-frequency 5G NR is creeping towards reality in the U.S., thanks to the FAA backing down. After the aviation regulator had vetoed C-band deployment—based on precious little evidence—it looks like as much as 280 MHz of extra spectrum is now ready to switch on.

    Analysis: Nomadic DevOps gets more bandwidth

    While band 77 is nowhere near the much-vaunted “FR2” extremely high frequency bands, this is a useful chunk of extra spectrum for mobile and nomadic apps. Next stop: ubiquitous Ka-band.

    Jon Brodkin: FAA agrees not to seek any more 5G delays

    The Federal Aviation Administration tentatively agreed not to seek any more 5G delays from AT&T and Verizon, potentially ending a battle over the aviation industry’s unproven claim that 5G … will interfere with airplane altimeters. [Their] C-Band spectrum licenses are for the frequencies from 3.7 GHz to 3.98 GHz.
    …
    The deal incorporates voluntary commitments that AT&T and Verizon previously made, including “C-Band radio exclusion zones” around airports for six months. [They] modeled the exclusion zones after those used in France, which are 910×2100 meters.
    …
    Assuming there are no further problems, AT&T and Verizon would be able to use their spectrum licenses without extra restrictions after July 5. … President Biden applauded the agreement … calling it “a significant step in the right direction.”


    In summary? Here’s Dieter Bohn:

    The agency in charge of airplanes is mad about wireless things. But the agency in charge of wireless things and the companies that make them lost a game of chicken.
    …
    GREAT JOB AMERICA. … I always said I wanted Internet Service Providers to be Dumb Pipes, but I never expected them to be this dumb.


    Has anyone read the FAA’s detailed report? bburdge has:

    I can see why the FAA is backing down here now, it only makes sense when your key report could be paraphrased as: “We got a couple grad students to run some basic model comparisons … using altimeter data from the aviation industry (with a proven track record of lying to us) and then went golfing for eight months before publishing … but didn’t bother … to actually test anything.”

    3. Mozilla Forgets its Values

    Firefox custodian, the Mozilla Foundation, has angered many by promoting a “grossly irresponsible” “Ponzi scheme” that harms the environment. What is this awful thing? I hear you ask. It’s cryptocurrency.

    Analysis: Imaginary money is bad—is this the last straw for Mozilla?

    Less than a year ago, Mozilla said it wants to be carbon-neutral, but it’s already reneged on that promise: Distributed proof-of-work systems require … well, work. And that work uses ridiculous amounts of energy per DeFi transaction. Electricity production is a zero-sum game, so cryptocurrencies and NFTs cause climate change by emitting ridiculous amounts of CO₂e.

    Liam Proven: Mozilla founder blasts browser maker

    A few days ago, Mozilla Foundation invited netizens on Twitter to send in cryptocurrency donations. … This move by the Firefox browser maker rapidly drew criticism.
    …
    As recently as September, Moz’s web-standards lead Tantek Çelik slammed cryptocurrencies as being unsustainable, stating: “[They] are harmful for sustainability. … Their energy requirements grow without any discernible upper bound, which is grossly irresponsible given the global environmental crisis.”
    …
    Mozilla has accepted crypto-coin donations for years, perhaps as part of its long-ongoing efforts to alienate its own users: It’s only the payment provider that changed.


    Chief among critics was Jamie “jwz” Zawinski:

    I founded Mozilla and I’m here to say **** you and **** this. Everyone involved in the project should be witheringly ashamed of this decision to partner with planet-incinerating Ponzi grifters.
    …
    Stop saying you were promised flying cars. Unless you were born in 1935, you weren’t promised flying cars, you were promised a cyberpunk corporate dystopia.


    It’s a shark-jump moment thinks Jeremy Keith:

    The most convincing argument I’ve heard yet for switching away from Firefox as my main browser comes from Mozilla. I wasn’t expecting that plot twist.

    The Moral of the Story: What is safety to one is not always safety to another.


    You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi or tlv@richi.uk.

    Image: Benjamin Hayward (via Unsplash)

  • Making Blockchain-Based App Dev More Accessible

    Making Blockchain-Based App Dev More Accessible

    Blockchain has many potential uses cases outside of cryptocurrency. Established sectors such as financial, automotive, supply chain, and mobility could soon move to adopt decentralized applications and distributed ledgers. The technology has even been hailed as the ideal foundation to maintain a connected economy once humans go interplanetary.

    Recently, spectators note a swelling interest in decentralized, peer-to-peer, autonomous development approaches. Eyeing the excitement around cryptocurrency and blockchain, many developers are eager to start experimenting with their own blockchain-based applications. This incoming disruption could remove the middle man and give power back to people, says blockchain and cryptocurrency entrepreneur Max Kordek.

    However, building your own blockchain from scratch is incredibly difficult. So, I recently met with Max Kordek, co-founder, Lisk, to understand how to make blockchain-based app development more accessible. According to Kordek, there are many benefits to creating your own blockchain, but simplifying the creation process will be necessary to empower new startups and enable this new paradigm to flourish.

    Potential Use Cases

    The decentralized, tamper-proof nature of blockchain has disruptive potential to remove central authority and give more data control to the collective hive. “For me, it’s all about removing the middle man,” said Kordek. “It gives power back to the people.” Cryptocurrency is obviously the most widespread use case; Bitcoin is proof that a blockchain-based system can see mass adoption. But there are many other use cases outside of cryptocurrency where similar record-keeping is important.

    For example, the automotive industry could link data across manufacturers or share data between vehicles. NFTs are using blockchain to represent one-of-a-kind digital art objects. The airline industry is looking to blockchain to synchronize partner ecosystems. Blockchain is also transforming online gaming by substantiating in-game value systems.

    From insurance to supply chains to transportation, most industries hold a potential blockchain use case. But blockchain isn’t constrained to only terrestrial scenarios. Information systems engineers foresee blockchain powering future in-space economies. With significant funding going toward asteroid mining and Mars missions, an interplanetary humanity seems inevitable. Compared to Bitcoin, “Ethereum is a better choice for the interplanetary economy,” said David Vandervort. Gathering transactions in blocks and pinging satellites could enable monetary transactions from planet to planet. “An interplanetary financial system would have to be built on blockchain technology,” Kordek said.

    There is ripe potential in countless areas. But who will be leading this shift? According to Kordek, we may see corporations augmenting existing structures with blockchain. However, established enterprises will find it challenging to unshackle themselves from legacy systems. Instead, new startups are more likely to have a bigger say in the blockchain revolution. “It’s much more realistic that an entirely new startup adopts blockchain and structures their entire business around blockchain,” said Kordek.

    The State of Blockchain Development

    After Bitcoin was established, other developers forked the project and changed parameters to introduce new cryptocurrencies, such as Litecoin and Dogecoin. Eventually, Ethereum came along, which was unique as it enabled developers to build apps with smart contracts. However, “the developer ecosystem was horrible at the beginning,” explained Kordek. “It was the wild west of development.” To this day, it’s still very complicated to develop on Ethereum, he added. Plus, since it is open source and immutable, it’s vulnerable to security threats. “It’s like the biggest bounty program in the world—if there’s one bug, contracts are drained.” Ethereum also has scalability issues — it can only run 30 transactions per second, equating to 1 million transactions per day.

    For these reasons, it may be better to build your own blockchain. However, doing so is a difficult task. From a research perspective, this requires a lot of theoretical knowledge, Kordek explained. Blockchain also introduces new maintenance concerns—since the infrastructure is always on, it is unstoppable, making patching a bug or pushing an update tenuous at best. If hundreds of millions of dollars are dependent upon a stable network, one mistake could have drastic repercussions. The high development and QA roadblocks make prototyping blockchain-based systems from scratch challenging. “Experimentation is essential to bring an industry forward,” said Kordek. “It’s important we simplify blockchain development so more experimentation can happen.”

    Open-Source SDKs Make Blockchain More Usable

    So, how do we make blockchain more accessible so that experimentation can occur? Well, a lot of progress has already been made via ready-made open source language-specific SDKs. For example, there’s Polkadot (Rust), Cosmos (Go) and Lisk (JavaScript). Kordek is an advocate for language-specific libraries that fit a team’s programming preferences. Out of these, he favors JavaScript, as it’s generally easier to learn and already supports many web-based interfaces.

    These projects are not about the smart contracts themselves; they’re about improving your own blockchain creation process. According to Kordek, going down this route grants more control in the early days. If something is broken, you can fix and push and update. If tokens are hacked, you could roll back and adjust things, he said.

    As companies get bigger and bigger, the technology could have a centralizing effect. “How can we somehow bring power back to people?” asks Kordek. Blockchain is one profound answer, empowering new entrants to alleviate problems across industries — it could even help us boldly go where no one has gone before.

  • Passing the Time

    Passing the Time

  • Why the Public Versus Private Blockchain Debate Is the Wrong Conversation

    Why the Public Versus Private Blockchain Debate Is the Wrong Conversation

    When blockchain burst onto the scene in 2009/2010, we watched as Bitcoin forever disrupted our monetary system. As the technology hits critical mass—a recent Deloitte survey showed a 2000% increase in interest in blockchain since its inception—the revolution has forked into two sides. There are the purists who want to only keep blockchains public, and the upstarts who see huge value in its private uses. 

    When lines are drawn in the sand of any disruptive change, it can seem like there is an undeniable right. But, what if we’re getting in the way of real revolution by fighting an unnecessary battle?

    Breaking Down the Beef

    The Argument for Public, or Permissionless, Blockchains

    Down with centralization, eliminate the middleman. Satoshi minimalists evangelize for a pure peer-to-peer system, uncorrupted by larger networks, corporations or governments. The beauty of Bitcoin was the emergence of databases both immutable and unburdened by firewalls, accessible to anonymous players who bought into a shared economic belief system. Complete transparency on a global scale was its defining feature. In this thrilling first wave of ICO-driven public blockchains, it was considered unsportsmanlike, if not unethical, to build and sell permissionless entities without an associated cryptocurrency. Any enterprise-driven motive would surely pollute the blockchain’s democratic roots.

    The Argument for Private, or Permission, Blockchains

    Amid all the enthusiasm for open read-and-write blockchains around cryptocurrencies, there started a rumble around the question of private blockchains. Permission-based platforms, in which access to read and write was assigned, were designed to address two vital issues:

    • Data relevancy — Bitcoin lovers champion a world in which institutions don’t have control over information and transactions. But, the reality in the enterprise world is commerce businesses need a hold on both. If the data you’re tasked with managing is relevant to only a handful of parties, why would you want to broadcast it to more?
    • Data privacy — If at the end of the day, not all data is meant to be shared at large—supplier-vendor relationships, financial transactions or health data, for instance—it has no place on a public blockchain to begin with. 

    What the Debate Is Missing

    The conversation regarding public versus private blockchain doesn’t have to be a polarizing one. It’s not an either/or debate but rather a question of application. Private blockchains don’t have to be viewed as the enemy, or a replacement for public ones. They are simply a case-specific option.

    When taken out of the theoretical arena, there is room for both open read-and-write blockchains and those with access restrictions. What we find in practice, having developed numerous blockchain applications for both entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs, is that the apparently different requirements of each tend to converge over time.

    That is, many applications built by entrepreneurs will integrate with one or more large corporate enterprises at some point, and will therefore need to address their needs (affordability, speed, boundaries, etc.). Similarly, many enterprise applications are tackling obstacles that currently prevent them from making their solutions more open and capable of incorporating tokens of some form.

    Both sides are invested in the value of bringing integrity around data. So, arguing over whether to support private or public blockchains misses the point. The real world has needs for both.

    A Call for Both Public and Private

    The gifts of blockchain technology are extraordinary. It is our best defense against the threats of theft, fraud and hackers, and can bring needed efficiency to every aspect of the digital landscape. Enterprises need to ensure some level of security, privacy, compliance and performance that only a private blockchain can provide.

    We also need public blockchains. They serve an enormous purpose whose value should never be denied. But private blockchains are not the enemy. To waste time demonizing them gets in the way of our tackling larger, more urgent questions. Where is this technology going next? How can we make best use of it in our daily lives? And, most importantly, how powerful will we be if we understand we’re all in this together?

     

    Andrew Filipowski

     

    This article was co-authored by Andrew “Flip” Filipowski, co-founder and co-CEO at Fluree. Flip was COO of Cullinet and was also the founder and CEO of PLATINUM technology, inc. He grew PLATINUM into the 8th largest software company in the world at the time of its sale to Computer Associates for $4 billion dollars. Upside Magazine named him one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in Information Technology. A recipient of Entrepreneur of the Year Awards from both Ernst & Young and Merrill Lynch, Flip has also been awarded the Young President’s Organization Legacy Award and the Anti-Defamation League’s Torch of Liberty award for his work fighting hate on the Internet.