On this week's #ProofofLove, Stephanie returns to the show with Tatiana and Lauren to discuss dating on the road with our very special guest, Leah Jonas from our sponsor Celsius.
Leah is the Global Head of Partnerships for Celsius Network, a market-leading cryptocurrency consumer lending, and borrowing platform. She started off her career working with early stage tech start-ups before discovering cryptocurrency and joining Celsius Network as one of the early hires. She has worked in almost every role in the company before settling in business development.
As a self-described digital nomad, Leah discusses with the ladies her personal side and how is dating on the road. We tackle some of the tougher questions about life on the road, such as:
How do you strike a balance between your professional and personal life?
Where do you meet people and are dating apps helpful for people on the road?
How do you overcome cultural and language barriers as you move around the world?
Leah also dishes on the criteria for a potential good date, whether she sees herself settling down, and changing people's perspectives of Americans.
About the Guests:
Leah is the Global Head of Partnerships for Celsius Network, a market-leading cryptocurrency consumer lending, and borrowing platform. She brings a wealth of experience in marketing, sales, and strategic partnerships from the corporate and start-up world. As Celsius as one of the company's early hires, Leah has contributed to all phases of the company's development, from formation to funding to product development to market positioning and expansion. While at Celsius Leah has spearheaded some of the most integral projects within the organization including the white-label integration of Celsius' services to multiple platforms resulting in the increase of overall AUM measuring in the tens of millions. At present, she is located in London where she will be building out Celsius' EU operations and strategy.
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*You have been listening to Proof of Love. This show may contain adult content, language, and humor and is intended for mature audiences. If that's not you, please stop listening. Nothing you hear on Proof of Love is intended as financial advice, legal advice, therapy or really, anything other than entertainment. Take everything you hear with a grain of salt. Oh, and if you're hearing to us on an affiliate network, the ideas and views expressed on this show, are not necessarily of the those of the network you are listening on, or of any sponsors or any affiliate products you may hear about on the show.
Crypto exchange Bakkt’s chief executive Kelly Loeffler has reportedly been picked by Governor Brian Kemp until the special election in November 2020. Loeffler will likely be asked next week to serve as the replacement of U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson, who has announced plans to vacate his senate seat on December 31, according to a report […]
After attending a blockchain conference in North Korea in April, a developer at the Ethereum Foundation has been arrested in Los Angeles on Thanksgiving Day.
Two years ago I sat down with Bitcoin trader & analyst, Luke Martin in LA to record the very first episode of What Bitcoin Did
Luke has dropped out of school to focus on his trading full time, and he's now known as being one of the most followed in his field. He's also a fellow podcaster, the host of the Coinist Podcast and even been a guest on CNN.
By coincidence, we managed to find ourselves in the same city exactly two years ago to the day that Luke and I recorded WBD001. Two years is a significant amount of time in Bitcoin and lots has happened. Luke and I have remained friends, and we have supported each other along the way, Luke telling me to stop fighting on Twitter, and I have encouraged Luke to continue podcasting.
As a fellow podcaster, Luke speaks with people in the industry, gaining insights predominantly on the Bitcoin market, trading and exchanges. In this interview, we sit down and reflect on the two years since we recorded WBD001 and discuss Bitcoin, financial services and Twitter.
The Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection research team shared insights on a new crypto stealing malware called Dexphot that has already infected close to 80,000 devices since October 2019.
Bitcoin Sign Guy (Christian) comes onto the 99th episode of POV Crypto for a fascinating conversation about dissident tech and how he sees people leveraging it to gain more sovereignty. We discuss the following topics:
Thanksgiving Day is the perfect opportunity to turn our attention to the people, events and things that make our lives better and offer us reasons to feel grateful. While meeting family members around the dinner table is an excellent way of expressing appreciation, those of us who irreversibly fell down the Bitcoin rabbit hole may have a few extra reasons to show gratitude.
Why should one feel thankful for Bitcoin? Whether we like it or not, it has changed our views on finance, politics, law and economics. The simple act of learning how and why this decentralized, nongovernmental currency came to be certainly has transformative effects. Bitcoin is much more than economic theory: It indiscriminately empowers millions of people around the world to store value and transact. This is a reality to which even the mightiest of governments and transnational corporations are trying to adapt.
Without further ado, here are five reasons to feel thankful for Bitcoin.
1. Bitcoin Is Conservative, Robust and Predictable
In most countries around the world, changing the rules overnight is only a matter of majorities. Even in the United States, where checks and balances are supposed to bring about slow changes, the situation can become unpredictable in a matter of days. A member of Congress submits the draft for a bill, and then proceeds to convince elected officials from both the House of Representatives and the Senate to vote for it. If the required majority is attained, then the voted bill gets sent to the President to either sign or veto.
In the case of Bitcoin, changing the rules is a lot more difficult. It requires the consensus of a majority of user nodes and support by the miners. There is always a threat that the chain is going to split due to conflicting attempts to change rules, and, therefore, everyone is incentivized to play by the existing rules. And even in the absence of conflict, too much consensus about change may lead to faulty decisions that irreversibly destroy the value proposition of Bitcoin. It’s called the Nakamoto Consensus and it’s one of the finest uses of game theory we’ve ever seen in finance, politics and computer science.
Under this system of checks and balances, the general incentive is to be cautious and conservative. There is no reason to change something that works, and nobody is pressured to update their node client to support every BIP, feature or fix (for instance, SegWit adoption is still slow, there are plenty of bitcoiners who have never used the Lightning Network or a sidechain, and there are plenty of nodes running old versions of Bitcoin Core without validation issues).
Furthermore, BIPs and Core version updates are not law: If someone doesn’t want to use them or acknowledge their existence, then Bitcoin offers freedom to keep on running older clients and avoid some features. In the real world, you can’t opt in and out of respecting laws, and you can’t have a type of relationship with your government where you can opt to use (and pay taxes for) certain services. Being able to choose whatever suits your needs is powerful, and Bitcoin offers an important lesson about maintaining harmony while incentivizing self-interest.
Bitcoin reminds us why stability matters and why our money must not be changed. This is especially evident whenever somebody comes up with a proposal that fixes short-term problems. We should be grateful for Bitcoin because, in an era of global uncertainty and reckless political decisions, it offers robustness, transparency and predictability.
2. Bitcoin Teaches Us to Verify
In a world where formal education teaches us to defer to hierarchical authorities and have blind trust in their competence, Bitcoin perpetually reminds us to ask questions and check for ourselves. “Don’t trust, verify” might be a community meme, but it refers to a mindset which precedes individual sovereignty.
Bitcoiners are encouraged to only use software whose code is transparent and tested, to read the terms of service before onboarding exchanges, and to maintain a degree of skepticism in regards to people, companies and software. Also, running a full Bitcoin node is one of the most important aspects of the entire experience: Not only does it check the validity of your transactions and keep you on the right chain, but it also protects your privacy by storing all records on your own hard drives.
As means of verification, full nodes are the most efficient and affordable devices in the entire history of money. If gold and banknotes required human experts, special tools and formal ways of guaranteeing validity, Bitcoin nodes handle the operation faster and keep the rules in check. Thanks to them, we are certain at all times that no fake bitcoins get validated, and we keep inflation in check.
We should be grateful for this whole mechanism of quick verification, as it provides a strong foundation for the underlying economic system and also encourages us to become critical thinkers. Not having to worry about receiving a payment in fake money is an incredible innovation in itself.
As cypherpunk and Bitcoin 2020 keynote speaker Nick Szabo always says, “trust scales poorly.” That’s why, in the context of a decentralized network, we should always verify transactions, as well as other people’s intentions.
3. Bitcoin Is Scarce, Just Like Our Time and Money
When the supply of fiat money depends on the printing habits of central bankers, and the value of the resulting bills is backed by a seemingly endless cycle of debt, Bitcoin reminds us of a different era when money was scarce and backed by resource-intensive mining.
Everything around us is limited and scarce, including our own time in this world. Bitcoin teaches us how to embrace these limits and try to make the most out of them. Instead of falling in the “unlimited” trap of our consumption-based times, we moderate our time preference. We learn, once again, that saving matters and can bring great rewards in the long term. We rediscover our basic needs (as opposed to the never-ending wants that the advertisement industry creates), but we also find a balance between the extremes of frugality and consumerism.
As famously described by Aristotle, virtue is an equilibrium between two polarizing temptations. And when we are faced with a situation where we can either hold onto our sound money for a longer time or satisfy our wants and needs, we tend to make better decisions. If we approach the matter rationally, we won’t spend everything, but we won’t prevent ourselves from living decent and fulfilling lives either.
We should be grateful for Bitcoin, as it teaches us an important lesson about balance and virtue.
4. Bitcoin Is Irreversible
Often times, human action and the construction of norms and narratives will make us think that events can be erased from history and the collective memory of people. With enough authority and propaganda, lots of people can be convinced to replace their memories with official fairytales. Revisionism is a big part of our culture and it often escapes our scrutiny just because it’s nice and convenient.
Bitcoin is different in the sense that human actions taking place on the blockchain will always remain there. Transactions are irreversible, messages and files that get added to blocks will always be there once they receive six confirmations, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. If anything, Bitcoin is a reflection of human nature and an open history book that no government agenda can erase or sugarcoat.
If anything, Bitcoin is closer to the laws of nature (where actions cannot be reversed or forgotten by elemental forces) than it is to political records. To some, this can be frightening — especially from a financial perspective, where funds that get lost can never be recovered as easily as in the case of traditional banking. However, the situation only resembles the times when gold stashes had to be protected from thieves.
Yet the greater lesson to be learned is about responsibility. In a revisionist world, recklessness is incentivized by public narratives and the political decisions that change according to human judgment. In the case of Bitcoin, you can’t fool anyone that a transaction never happened. We should be grateful that an invention which promotes objective truth exists and functions outside of human subjectivity.
5. Bitcoin Is Unconfiscatable
Confiscation is a delicate topic and a recurring theme in our culture and history. Without appealing to governmental authority, we can define it as a forceful wealth transfer where one party finds legitimacy in taking another party’s possessions. In the greater context of nation states, confiscation is part of the rules and social contract.
Ideologically, confiscation is the polar opposite of respecting private property. By design, Bitcoin uses advanced cryptography to prevent any third party from seizing somebody else’s funds for any reason. This principle closely follows the cypherpunk ethos, where human rights always prevail over specific law enforcement. In the preamble of 1994’s “The Cyphernomicon,” Tim May presents a “Great Divide” between free speech, privacy and compliance with laws. Bitcoin takes this principle and extends it toward protecting private property.
In an era where political movements find various legitimations to seize wealth and confiscate, Bitcoin acts as a bastion of resistance. Instead of encouraging arbitrary confiscation, it creates dialogue and negotiation. If Bitcoin whales were to contribute to a cause, they would have to willingly donate part of their wealth. If the government wanted to take your bitcoins, then a process of deliberation or extortion is required — and this empowerment and sovereignty is unlike anything we’ve ever seen in our history.
We should feel grateful for the unconfiscatable nature of Bitcoin, it helps temper political urges and, to an extent, replaces use of force with voluntary actions.
6. Bitcoin Is Free Speech
Imagine a world where everyone can have their opinion heard as long as they respect formal rules about broadcasting their message, and they pay a fee. It’s exactly what Bitcoin offers us: As long as we are willing to make a transaction within the network’s rules and pay for miners to pick it up, we can make a political or financial statement to the entire world.
Most famously, the Genesis Block includes a political statement which explains why Bitcoin is needed: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on Brink of Second Bailout For Banks.” This led to an entire adoption movement which conflated Bitcoin with various human ideals for independence from government intervention and sovereignty.
In a recent academic research paper published by Justin S. Wales and Richard J. Ovelmen, Bitcoin is equated with free speech and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It’s refreshing to identify scholarly efforts to legitimize Bitcoin as a network for free speech (as opposed to the multiple mainstream media narratives which antagonized it throughout the years).
If anyone wants to make a written, political statement in a Bitcoin block, or simply send a transaction without facing censorship, then the network itself is entirely neutral and void of human biases. This uncensorability is the new paradigm in regards to freedom of speech, and we should feel grateful that we have it.
We Should Be Thankful for Bitcoin
Next time you think about the people and things that make you feel grateful, just close your eyes and imagine a world without Bitcoin: Central banks wouldn’t be pressured to temper their printing habits due to the threat of a free, disinflationary currency; we would be forced to put much more trust in authorities and institutions; we wouldn’t appreciate scarcity as much; and our free speech would be limited by the rules of governments and transnational corporations.
During this year’s Thanksgiving dinner, we shouldn’t necessarily talk about gains, end-of-year returns and other facts that sound like financial advice — and will certainly make a few family members roll their eyes. Instead, it’s much more important to focus on the unique technological advantages of Bitcoin and highlight Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention as a tool which preserves human rights, increases individual responsibility and protects free speech. We should all feel grateful for these.
This is an op ed by Vlad Costea. Views expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Bitcoin Magazine or BTC Inc.
3iQ has listed the preliminary prospectus for its bitcoin fund as the next step toward an initial public offering (IPO), likely on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
Around one third of the top 120 exchanges are "weak" when it comes to know-your-customer (KYC) verification, while two-thirds "lack strong KYC policies," the firm said.
Welcome to episode 72 of The Bitcoin Game, I'm Rob Mitchell. This episode came about in an unexpected way. I had the opportunity to speak with Guy Hirsch (USA Managing Director for eToro) at the CIS conference in Los Angeles. My plan was to grab some sound bites from Guy to use in podcast episodes as part of eToro's sponsorship. But I'm such a curious person that I couldn't help but ask a bunch of genuine questions I had about the platform. Turned out, the brief interview was interesting and informative enough that I decided to release it as a stand-alone episode. So, if you've wondered about eToro after seeing them practically everywhere in the crypto space (not to mention the snazzy eToro commercial with Alec Baldwin), this episode will get you up to speed!
Are you interested in getting into the cryptocurrency markets but don't know where to start building your portfolio? The answer is CopyTrader, by eToro. With CopyTrader, you can automatically copy every trade of eToro's top crypto traders at the exact price in real time. No need to study up on markets or develop your own strategies. Simply sign up and copy the trader of your choice. Any profits they make, you do too (proportional to your investment). With eToro, you get access to the world's most popular cryptocurrencies, with transparent trading fees, all in one easy-to-use app.
While much of a Bitcoiner's time is spent in the world of digital assets, sometimes it's nice to own a physical representation of the virtual things you care about. For just the price of a cup of coffee or two (at Starbucks), you can own the world-famous Bitcoin Keychain.
Note: We've migrated our RSS feed (and primary content host) from SoundCloud to Libsyn. So if you noticed the SoundCloud numbers aren't nearly as high as they used to be, that's the reason.
GiveBitcoin founder Cory Klippsten struggled to warm his parents up to Bitcoin. For two years, he coaxed and educated, until his evangelism finally paid off in the spring of 2019.
“After 100s of hours, books, podcasts, articles, I finally got my parents to buy some bitcoin,” he told Bitcoin Magazine.
That was five years after Klippsten received his own first bitcoin from a benevolent stranger at a tech conference. He lost the keys and didn’t take a dive down the rabbit hole. That plunge wouldn’t come until the beginning of 2017, when Klippsten bought into bitcoin — both in the literal and in the ideological sense.
“After getting super into bitcoin, I tried to become as skilled as possible to be a pitchman for bitcoin and being an evangelist, thinking that there was some magical way to talk about bitcoin and red-pill somebody in a twenty-minute conversation — kinda like a startup pitch.”
Incidentally, his Twitter username is ₿itcoin Morpheus, an homage to the captain of the Nebuchadnezzar in The Matrix who “red pills” Neo on the reality that his world is a computer simulation.
Unlike Morpheus, though, who enlightens Neo to the cypher-dystopia represented in the film in a matter of minutes, Klippsten finds that bitcoin is “just not something that can be grasped in one conversation.”
That’s why he started GiveBitcoin.
GiveBitcoin: Education and Money, Wrapped in One
GiveBitcoin is a service that allows Bitcoiners to send bitcoin to their friends, loved ones and anyone in between. You can give as little as $5 or as much as $4,900, and the gift comes with a minimum time lock of one year and a maximum lock of five years. That way, they can’t immediately liquidate it without waiting — and learning, too.
The platform provides 12 chapters of lessons on topics that range from the history of money, to the rise of altcoins (and why they differ from bitcoin), to layer 2 solutions like Lightning and even hardware wallets. The idea here is to give people a chance to educate themselves about bitcoin and the tenets of self-sovereignty (e.g., the benefits of running a full node) so they can make a fully informed decision about what to do with their bitcoin once the timelock expires.
This educational content, Klippsten claims, has been “crowdsourced from the best minds in bitcoin” and includes bits from the likes of Saifedean Ammous, Stephan Livera, Yan Pritzker and Michael Caras (a.k.a, the Bitcoin Rabbi).
“It’s a mix of tech and media to red pill people,” Klippsten summarized.
HODL and Learn
These lock-in periods are what Klippsten called “legal” timelocks. They don’t take place on-chain with “hash time locked contracts” (HTLCs) like with Lightning. This is partly because HTLCs are dictated by block height and are subject to roughly a one-year expiration date. Plus, it’s a difficult concept for newcoiners to grasp, so it’s probably not the best idea to expose them to an advanced technical feature before they even know what the blockchain is.
Instead, all bitcoin is custodied with Prime Trust, a Nevada-based bank that has carved out a niche in providing banking services to the largely banking-deprived Bitcoin industry. Each recipient must sign paperwork (and conduct KYC) upon claiming their bitcoin to ensure that, legally, the gift belongs to them, not GiveBitcoin. Recipients also don’t have to complete the courses to claim their gift, though Klippsten, of course, hopes that they will.
If a recipient never claims their bitcoin, then the giver is never charged for the amount they intended to send (when using the service, you send GiveBitcoin an ACH transfer for the amount you wish to give, not actual bitcoin). The fees for the service are pretty modest: $2 for anything under $100 or 2 percent for anything over $100.
Network Effects
Fresh out of beta as it is, GiveBitcoin already has plans to expand its services. Klippsten said the team is cooking up a referrals program where they’ll share half of their fees with users based on how many gifts they send on the platform.
The hope is that this will accelerate the act of gifting satoshis, which Klippsten holds is the most effective way to nudge people down the rabbit hole. Once they have skin in the game, they (hopefully) become curious enough to learn more and begin to care.
From there, it’s all about network effect and getting bitcoin into the hands of as many people as possible.
“Right now there’s an estimated 7 million people around the globe that own $100 or more worth of bitcoin. We are going to try to create 21 million newcoiners with $100 dollars or more,” Klippsten said.
Bitstop, a Bitcoin Automated Teller Machine (ATM) operator, has partnered with Simon Malls, one of the biggest shopping mall operators in the United States, to install Bitcoin ATMs across California, Florida and Georgia.
According to the November 26, 2019, announcement, Bitstop’s ATMs are now live in five Simon Malls locations. The company’s chief executive and co-founder Andrew Barnard stated the firm is hoping to increase its network of machines from about 500 to over 2,000 by the end of 2020.
Answering Market Demand for Bitcoin ATMs
“Coming across a dedicated bitcoin ATM at a shopping mall or airport makes Bitcoin much more real in the consciousness of the mainstream,” Barnard told Bitcoin Magazine. “Millions of people will walk by these bitcoin ATMs within the next year. It will challenge their previous beliefs. These locations make Bitcoin much more real to the average person.”
Bitstop’s ATMs support bitcoin only and they are strictly one-way machines. According to Barnard, this is deliberate on their part. As he points out, they’ve noticed that the demand for purchasing bitcoin far outweighs that for selling the asset.
“We have two-way machines but the added cost and maintenance of the machines is not always worth it. Currently, the demand for cashing out bitcoin is significantly lower when compared to the demand for buying Bitcoin, at least in the United States. The reverse may be true outside of the United States depending on the jurisdiction.”
Bitstop installed its first ATM in Florida in 2015. About that time, there were less than 300 bitcoin ATMs globally. Fast forward to 2019 and there are over 6,000 of these machines around the world, with more than 60 percent domiciled in the U.S.
While Bitstop has all of its machines in the U.S., Barnard did reveal that there were plans to install their devices internationally as well.
“We’ve built a turn-key program for other operators who want to own and operate their own Bitcoin ATM fleet,” he said.
More Bitcoin ATMs, Further Bitcoin Adoption
The move will see a further increase in the number of bitcoin ATMs, a number which, according to analysis platform Coin ATM Radar, surpassed the 6,000 mark earlier this month. The United States currently dwarfs other countries in terms of ATMs installed, with about 65 percent of the total haul around the world.
Recently, Canadian crypto exchange Coinsquare acquired a controlling interest in Just Cash, a fintech firm that connects traditional ATMs to the crypto space. “By using the millions of existing ATMs around the world, we can now bridge the gap and give new users the easiest and most familiar experience to purchase cryptocurrency,” Coinsquare’s CEO Cole Diamond said to Bitcoin Magazine.
As the crypto ecosystem continues to grow, wallets and exchanges are quickly evolving to differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace. Viktor Radchenko, CEO and founder of Trust Wallet, joins us this week to talk about why he created a noncustodial wallet solution, what makes Trust Wallet unique, and how the acquisition by Binance has allowed his team to focus on a long term vision. Viktor helps us understand what it means to be part of the Binance Ecosystem, and what he believes the future holds for wallets, key storage and custody.
Topics discussed in this episode:
Victor's bio and how he ended up moving from the Ukraine to the US
How hacking games got Victor into cryptocurrency
What Trust Wallet is and its' strengths in the wallet landscape
What it means for Trust Wallet to be secure, opensource, decentralized, and anonymous
What Vicktor believes the future holds for wallets and key storage
The Binance acquisition of Trust Wallet
Trust Wallet's policy for adding new coins and the criteria they look at
The Swiss Federal Council has adopted a revised proposal to remove legal hurdles still holding up blockchain innovation, and will pass the legislation to the parliament.
Can Bitcoin self-regulate or does it require government regulation?
On this episode of #TheTatianaShow, we explore this question and more with Amber Scott, a friend from the Baltic Honey Badger Conference.
Amber is the founder, CEO, and Chief Anti-Money Laundering Ninja for Outlier Solutions. They are a Canadian consulting firm focusing on developing compliance solutions for clients such as banks, dealers in virtual currencies, and credit unions. Their areas of expertise include Canadian anti-money laundering, counter terrorist financing, privacy, and regulatory compliance. Amber is a self-professed compliance geek with a passion for technology.
Tatiana and Amber have a great conversation covering a wide swath of topics including government or self regulation of crypto, which country has the best regulations, and what Amber is most excited for in 2020 for Bitcoin. We even throw in some talk about Ross Ulbricht, marijuana legalization, and Orwell's 1984.
About the Guests:
Amber D. Scott, MBA, CIPPC, CBP, CAMS
Founder, CEO & Chief AML Ninja,Outlier Solutions Inc. aka Outlier Compliance Group
Amber is a compliance geek with a passion for technology.
After graduating from the University of Waterloo, Amber joined the compliance group at one of Canada's largest insurers where she focused on the implementation of technology-based processes to streamline compliance. She has since worked in in-house roles with major securities firms and banks. Somewhere along the line, she added MBA, CBP, and a few other letters after her name.
Amber joined a boutique compliance consulting firm, then larger consulting firm, before getting frustrated enough with the status quo to launch Outlier Solutions Inc. (Outlier) in 2013. Outlier specializes in anti-money laundering (AML) and privacy compliance. The company is based on one of the premises of Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers: that to be really good at something you need a lot of practice (about 10,000 hours). Each of Outlier's team members has 10,000 hours or more of in-house (not consulting) compliance experience. Amber loves leading this team of entrepreneurial compliance badasses.
*You have been listening to the Tatiana Show. This show may contain adult content, language, and humor and is intended for mature audiences. If that's not you, please stop listening. Nothing you hear on The Tatiana Show is intended as financial advice, legal advice, or really, anything other than entertainment. Take everything you hear with a grain of salt. Oh, and if you're hearing to us on an affiliate network, the ideas and views expressed on this show, are not necessarily of the those of the network you are listening on, or of any sponsors or any affiliate products you may hear about on the show.
Former PBoC head Xiaochuan Zhou says the digital yuan will enable retail payments first, but might need a different technical design for cross-border payments.
The AWS re:Invent conference is coming to Las Vegas the week of December 2–6, and Coinbase is representing! Our incredible Product and Engineering team members will be speaking about site reliability, scaling our blockchain infrastructure, and teaching about cryptocurrencies. Come and join us!
AWS re:Invent is the annual Amazon Web Services (AWS) learning conference in Las Vegas that attracts developers, system administrators, architects, and technical decision makers from all over the cloud computing world. Last year, they had an estimated attendance of 50,000 and succeeded in taking over most of the famous Las Vegas Strip. This year, re:Invent is anticipated to set new records, and the Coinbase team is proud to be contributing to the learning aspect of the conference.
As a company that has grown from 600 employees to over 800 this past year, we are committed to continuous development. Our engineers are excited about sharing stories from the trenches, our lessons learned, and talking shop about blockchain, crypto, and decentralized applications with fellow technologists who want to come along for the ride.
Coinbase is representing at the Nuvola Theater, Expo Hall at The Aria Resort and Casino. Come join us on Monday, Dec 2 at 4:40 PM — 5:00 PM. Photo: Courtesy of AWS.
Conference Events
If you are attending the conference, or watching from the comfort of your home or office over Twitch, please tune in for the following sessions by our talented colleagues:
Amy Li, a Site Reliability Engineer on our Reliability team and Lalita Maraj, a Software Engineer on our Cloud team will be presenting on how Coinbase handles incident management by leveraging AWS. Come learn how Coinbase made incident processing as user-friendly as possible — from creating an incident to reviewing a postmortem document. Wednesday, Dec 4, 12:15 PM — 1:15 PM, MGM, Level 2, Cedar Ballroom 254.
James Lu, a Software Engineer on our Consumer Product team and Goutham Buchi, an Engineering Manager on our Consumer Product team will be presenting on how Amazon Pinpoint is used as a core engagement service to delight our customers and grow our business. Wednesday, Dec 4, 10:45 AM — 11:45 AM, MGM, Level 3, Chairman’s Ballroom 368.
Graham Jenson, a Sr. Software Engineer on our Cloud team will be presenting on how to use the AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) to develop serverless applications in a security-conscious organization. See how understanding features of AWS Lambda, AWS CloudFormation, and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) helps you provide a secure way to take your serverless ideas to production. Monday, Dec 2, 4:40 PM — 5:00 PM, Aria, Level 1 West, Nuvola Theater — Expo Hall.
For the latest news and updates, follow us on Twitter @coinbase, or like us on Facebook. Interested in learning more about opportunities at Coinbase? Check out our careers page. We saved a seat for you!
This website may contain links to third-party websites or other content for information purposes only (“Third-Party Sites”). The Third-Party Sites are not under the control of Coinbase, Inc., and its affiliates (“Coinbase”), and Coinbase is not responsible for the content of any Third-Party Site, including without limitation any link contained in a Third-Party Site, or any changes or updates to a Third-Party Site. Coinbase is not responsible for webcasting or any other form of transmission received from any Third-Party Site. Coinbase is providing these links to you only as a convenience, and the inclusion of any link does not imply endorsement, approval or recommendation by Coinbase of the site or any association with its operators.
Continuing the series on the various ways one can learn about the technical aspects of Bitcoin, in this article we will focus on transcripts and contributing to or reading the archive of transcripts maintained by Bryan Bishop (kanzure).
In the early years of Bitcoin’s history, all communication involving Satoshi Nakamoto occurred online on mailing lists, IRC and the BitcoinTalk forum. These years are well archived by the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute. There are no recordings of Satoshi speaking, presumably as they could have been used to identify him. However, once in-person meetups, conferences and meetings of core developers started to be organized, there was a danger of content from verbal presentations and discussions disappearing and being forgotten.
In the last decade, Bishop has transcribed over 600 transcripts racking up over a million-and-a-half words. The transcripts can be accessed here and pull requests to add or edit a transcript can be submitted to this GitHub repository. A small selection of highlights include a transcript on choosing safe curves for elliptic curve cryptography from 2014, a transcript of Greg Maxwell presenting confidential transactions from 2017 and the transcripts from the Bitcoin Core developer meetings that are not filmed or otherwise recorded.
Typing at the Speed of Lightning
At the CES Summit 2019, Bishop explained why all talks should have transcripts. These reasons include facilitating further discussion after the talk, distributing the content beyond the attendees in the room, and text being easier to parse and search than video and audio. His presentation spurred others to attempt to transcribe Bishop’s talk in real time.
Bishop takes pride in publishing the transcript before the speaker has sat down. He believes the immediate availability of the transcript is the most critical factor for those who utilize the transcripts, even more important than the quality of the content. It is certainly true that having a transcript available immediately at the conclusion is extremely valuable for supporting further in-person discussions and for bringing up to speed those who are not present but interested in what was discussed.
Granted, Bishop is an extremely fast typist. He started transcribing in high school when he sought to prove to his high school principal that the classes were a waste of his time. After four years of transcribing the classes’ content, he realized no one cared.
However, one upside of the experience is that Bishop was ranked 30th for typing speed out of 5 million competitors. He can type up to 200 words per minute. Court stenographers can typically type faster than this but they take advantage of special keyboards called stenotypes and a system of abbreviations called shorthand. If it wasn’t for his high-paying career in software development, Bishop could try to join the ranks of court stenographers earning around $200,000 per year.
The fastest speaker in the Bitcoin ecosystem is undoubtedly Laolu Osuntokun (roasbeef), CTO of Lightning Labs. He has become almost as renowned for his pace of verbal delivery as his weighty contributions to the lnd Lightning implementation and his work on Neutrino, the privacy-preserving light client. So if anyone in the Bitcoin ecosystem would be able to defeat Bishop, it would be him.
However, Bishop, with his ability to type up to 200 words per minute, has risen to the challenge on a number of occasions and conquered this particular human adversary. (The rivalry is obviously entirely good-natured and other individuals in the Bitcoin community have got involved in the fun on Twitter [1] and [2])
AI: Not a Complete Alternative
So no human speaker in the Bitcoin ecosystem has been able to defeat Bishop. But what about artificial intelligence? As it did in chess and the board game Go, is AI able to overpower the best humanity can offer and type at least as fast as Bishop but with even greater accuracy? The answer to this question is not yet.
The Stephan Livera Podcast is one of the most popular Bitcoin podcasts. Livera has experimented with transcripts on his show. Initially, a sponsor of the show (GiveBitcoin) paid for human transcription on a small subset of episodes and they are available on Livera’s site. Some of them have since been added to the transcript repository maintained by Bishop. These “polished” transcripts were purchased from rev.com. They are high quality in terms of accuracy, they promise to be 99 percent accurate but they cost $1 per audio minute.
Livera has also tried machine-generated transcripts from rev.com. These cost only $0.10 per audio minute but are only promised to be 80 percent accurate. Therefore, they require Livera or somebody else to edit them afterward.
The Challenge of ‘Searchability’ in Transcripts
On the Software Engineering Daily podcast, Wenbin Fang — the founder of ListenNotes, a podcast search engine — discussed with Jeff Meyerson the latest state of podcast transcripts. Unlike Livera who is only concerned with the content he produces, ListenNotes is interested in all the podcasts that anyone in the world produces.
In an ideal world, all podcasts would be transcribed. Indexing on accurate transcripts would allow you to search “Bitcoin” and thus find every single podcast episode that mentioned Bitcoin even once.
However, Fang struggles with the same transcription challenges as Livera. He offers transcripts to paying customers and uses Google’s Speech-to-Text API to generate them, which currently costs $0.024 per audio minute. The accuracy of these transcripts is generally not of sufficient quality. They may be good enough to surface some keywords for a search engine index but the reading experience offered directly to a human is subpar.
Fang also can’t afford to pay for this transcription for every podcast episode ever created. Instead, he relies on metadata for his search engine which ideally includes keywords, the title and a description of the podcast.
Bishop himself has experimented with machine learning. He built a Tensorflow implementation of Baidu’s DeepSpeech and trained his model using audiobooks. With very few technical Bitcoin books in existence and even fewer that are available in audiobook format, it is unsurprising that he encountered an approximate 20 percent error rate in word recognition. So, for now at least, Bishop rules over AI for technical Bitcoin transcripts.
Ensuring Permanence
Another concern that transcripts address is the reliance on YouTube and other video hosting sites to preserve videos of presentations and to not start charging for access to them and/or restrict access to them. Once a video is uploaded to a video hosting site, it is unclear how many of the uploaders continue to store these large video files locally.
Bishop reckons that the half life of any given hyperlink on the web is less than a few years. As Bitcoin Magazine’s Vlad Costea reports, there have been numerous examples of YouTube making changes to how videos are monetized and how likely a certain video will show up in a user search. Additionally, the continuous changes to platform policies can sometimes result in the outright removal of certain types of content. With text files much smaller than video files, a large collection of transcripts can easily be self-hosted and/or made available on the Internet Archive.
How Can You Help?
Even if you don’t have Bishop’s typing abilities, you can still complete transcripts from videos and podcasts that Bishop has yet to transcribe. These include some of Bishop’s own presentations and podcast appearances. (Although Bishop is perhaps best known in the Bitcoin community for his transcripts, he is also a long-term contributor to Bitcoin Core, has published various proposals including on Bitcoin Vaults and even finds the time to work on notable biotech projects).
It’s also possible to look back and open pull requests on some of Bishop’s past transcripts, in case you are able to find inaccuracies, typos or missing sections, or would like to add references. The transcripts can often be improved by someone with the advantage of playback, volume control and speed adjustment.
Bishop notes that his transcripts aren’t always the most accurate. “I type as fast as I can, and sometimes my own ideas spill out when I am trying to fill in gaps as I go along. Most often, any errors are my own and not those of the speaker,” he says.
If there is a presentation or podcast that you find educational or informative then consider transcribing it. The exercise forces you to listen to the speaker’s every word and challenges your understanding of the topic to a greater extent than if you were merely passively listening. If you don’t understand a term or acronym, pause the video and look it up to ensure the accuracy of your transcript. Alternatively, you could try one of the machine-learning APIs and then manually edit the result.
It is important not to discount the value of having a transcript available at any point, even if it is days, months or even years afterward, especially when the content is of educational or historical value. A number of Bitcoin developers have admitted to referring back to Aaron van Wirdum’s epic three-parter in Bitcoin Magazine on how Lightning works years after publication to remind themselves of the basics of the Lightning protocol.
Having an available transcript will allow future academic papers, formal manuscripts and even patents to refer to a presentation. It will also make it more likely that the content is ranked higher on search engine results, meaning that more people get to see it online. Finally, it allows those with a hearing impairment to follow the discussion.
Bishop would like to raise funding for a “scribe fund” to pay for an individual (“not him,” as he says he is too busy with other work) with fast typing ability to travel and transcribe at different conferences as Bishop has been doing for a large part of the last decade. It would most likely need to be a developer or technical editor who is familiar with terms like “UTXO” and wouldn’t transcribe it as “You tea eks oh.”
So if you have benefitted from Bishop’s archive of transcripts, consider making a financial donation to this project to ensure the next decade of Bitcoin presentations and discussions are preserved and disseminated just like the previous decade’s.
Thanks to Bryan Bishop for reviewing this article and for maintaining this historical and educational archive of Bitcoin transcripts.
Telegram's founder and CEO Pavel Durov, plus two other employees, should be deposed to give testimony in the SEC case over whether the gram token is a security, a judge has ordered.
Polkadot, to be launched in 2020, is a project helmed by Ethereum co-creator Gavin Wood.
Its token design incorporates multiple ideas seen throughout the brief history of cryptoassets: work/stake token, fee token, token burns and "medallion"-like use cases.
Web 3 Foundation's Jack Platt joins me in breaking down the how tokens such as DOT aim to accrue value - and why they are not crypto "currencies".
Host: Jason Choi (@MrJasonChoi). If you enjoyed the show, consider tipping! This show is not financial advice.
Disclaimer: Jason Choi is an investor at Spartan Capital, the hedge fund arm of The Spartan Group. All opinions expressed by Jason and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of The Spartan Group and any of its subsidiaries and personnel. This podcast is for information purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. The Spartan Group and its clients may hold positions in assets described in the episode. Detailed‚disclaimers available at jasonchoi.me and‚spartangroup.io/disclaimer
A high-profile venture between startups Fluidity and Propellr was quietly shelved this summer, underscoring the hurdles real estate tokenization faces.
Host Tom Shaughnessy of Delphi Digital is joined by Matthew Finlayson, Head of Product and a co-founder of Invictus Capital. On this episode we discuss how Invictus Capital is democratizing access to investment opportunities through its blockchain-based asset management platform. The platform already supports 4 tokenized funds (ERC-20 tokens), with two more planned (emerging markets solar fund and a real estate fund).
To help support the show, please hit the subscribe button on iTunes so we can keep bringing you episodes like these!
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Disclosures:‚This podcast is strictly informational and educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any tokens or securities or to make any financial decisions. Do not trade or invest in any project, tokens, or securities based upon this podcast episode. The host may personally own tokens that are mentioned on the podcast.‚Tom owns tokens in ETH, BTC, XTZ, LEO, DCR and STX.‚
The current development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) is fundamentally flawed. Peter Thiel recently described crypto as libertarian and Reid Hoffman describes AI as authoritarian. This speaks to the concentration of power and control that has taken place in AI and ML. Cryptocurrency, as a technology, and Bitcoin in particular, empowers people to own their digital assets, the same way people can own real estate property and intellectual property. The data and information that is needed to fuel and power AI and ML is, however, only owned by a select few firms. They are the only ones who have a meaningful amount of data to truly make an impact and train their algorithms.
The ownership and sourcing of this data is a problem, one that I think crypto can provide a solution for.
Where Does AI Derive Its Source Material?
The first of its two major problems is source material. AI is nothing without the database it draws on. Tencent, Alibaba, Megvii, Sensetime, Facebook, Apple: It doesn’t matter which giant corporation’s tech you’re talking about, they all rely on the input of users’ faces into a massive database in order to function.
This can lead to interesting dichotomies, such as in China. Sensetime and Megvii each provide facial recognition tech to the north and to the south, respectively. Unless people are using both firms’ technology, then each company will only have half of the possible dataset. Due to this limitation, AI becomes not only vertical in its intelligence, but also very regional, reinforcing the very divisions and borders that the internet and networks have been trying to break down.
Who Holds the Power?
Let’s do a thought experiment. Say, one day, Google is able to get the database of every human being and is able to recognize the faces of every nationality and human being in the world, accurately and reliably. Does Google deserve to own that all-seeing AI? What about the people that contributed their faces as data, thus training that algorithm?
This highlights the second major problem with AI — power.
All the power is centralized and controlled by a handful of tech companies. How and why do they have this power? It goes back to the first problem. Without data, and lots of it, your AI is nothing. That means only a few companies that currently exist have true power in AI.
Why should they have complete control and autonomy over users’ data without any input from the public who have contributed so much? Sure, it’s just your face for now — but what about your medical data down the line? It’s a slippery slope to complete control of your life.
In AI, more often than not, and especially in deep learning and machine learning, the technology and algorithms are not the differentiating factors. The differentiating factor is data and how the data set is training the neural nets. There are pockets of data that are highly protected such as our health data. This is the reason why, even today, Google Health has not really progressed, but it could just be a matter of time before the data floodgates are fully open.
Who Should Own Your Data?
In an ideal world, those who have contributed data to train that AI should own a piece of that algorithm and potentially the profits it generates, just as a shareholder who invests their capital can share in its gains. However, unlike purchasing shares in Facebook itself, where, realistically, you have no control or say over how your data is used, having a share in the algorithm itself and, therefore, becoming part of its governance, the user actually has a say in how it’s used.
Owning data and being able to monetize it is not a new idea, but the real urgency is making sure that the crowd owns a piece of the AI algorithms generated by the data so it has input and a level of control. It’s not just about how people can profit from their data, but also how they can be part owners of an AI that redistributes the power structure itself.
It’s about governance but it’s also about the asymmetry of power. It is about taking back control from the large tech firms who, at the moment, run the whole show.
In the future, I see the appearance of vertical data trusts where representatives will be elected to govern the use of different data types for certain uses. I see trusts, the way they are set up today, as the best avenue for these vertical data silos to be governed.
The goal, then, is clear: We need a system that allows us to share our data, profit from it, and crucially, have a say in how it is used. Is there precedent for this? Is there a network where nobody owns the system but anyone can participate in this open, decentralized, borderless, and censorship-resistant network under certain terms and conditions? That precedent does exist, and it has become a part of our daily vernacular: It’s called Bitcoin.
Bitcoin as a Model for AI
Now that AI/data companies have become five of the top-10 companies in the world, those companies will just grow bigger and more powerful. Often behind these successful businesses are AI algorithms trained by data sets. Now that only a few companies own these data sets, it will eventually also be just a few companies that own the most powerful and strategic AIs.
Bitcoin allows for the crowd to co-own and govern a huge digital asset, i.e, bitcoin.
Bitcoin serves as a model for the crowd to share ownership and, importantly, control that ownership. If AI and ML facial recognition algorithms were the same as bitcoin, i.e., public blockchains, that would allow people to be part owners and operators of these powerful and valuable AIs by owning tokens.
How I see this working is quite simple. As a consumer or user, we already “invest” in the AI by contributing our data. Now imagine that data was a bitcoin token, and you can own it the same way as you own a bitcoin token. Then the profits that the AI produces can be paid to the users as tokens. What Bitcoin provides is the crowd ownership of something huge. Think of any AI system or ML system each being a bitcoin that can be borderless, censorship-resistant, neutral and open for anyone that contributes their own private data.
It is not simply about making money or profiteering from your own data; it’s about making sure that data is used responsibly and in line with a majority of the people who contributed.
You would own a piece of the AI software, not the company over it.
This would be a far cry from the lack of accountability in the large public companies who control this data today. Let us not forget that when Facebook was fined for mishandling its users’ data, the company’s share price increased. Accountability among big tech is a pipe dream.
Bitcoin is the first instance where one can own and control a piece of a digital asset through private keys. I’d like to see that happen with data, where people can govern that data and, ideally, get what they deserve for training an AI — a seat at the table and a say in how it’s used. We need to turn these AI and ML algorithms into Bitcoin so that the crowd can own and get what they deserve for contributing — control.
Having A Say in How Data Is Used
This would be an important step for us as a society as we continue to push back against the monopolies and oligarchies that big tech has fostered and allowed to fester over the years. As a society, we need to understand the value of our data, because we can be sure big tech does.
But what about the future? It’s very clear that users will be able to sell their data to companies. However, that’s not what’s important and will not solve the fundamental issues. We need to ensure that when contributing data we have a say in how it’s used. We may still disagree with the outcome, but at least we have a voice.
Bitcoin, through the model of true ownership, can bring that: a voice to the individual that’s as loud and clear as the biggest players in the room.
It may seem like a distant dream, but with the power and proliferation of Bitcoin, it’s a lot closer than you might think.
This is an op ed by Phil Chen. Views expressed are entirely his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Bitcoin Magazine or BTC Inc.
