Day: September 16, 2018

There is a theory that artificial intelligence (AI) will some day hit a critical point, called the technological singularity, after which it will rapidly and recursively improve its own technology and far surpass human intelligence. This article speculates what would happen to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency during such a scenario.

AI that is far more intelligent than humans referred to as artificial super intelligence (ASI) could perhaps be utilized by development teams to improve their cryptocurrency. ASI could improve a crypto’s code over and over again until it hits complete optimization, making the most efficient, scalable, and secure cryptocurrency possible. As it is, it takes many months and potential bickering for any positive change to be implemented into a code. An ASI could implement hundreds or thousands of positive changes in an extremely short amount of time. Eventually, development teams would be a thing of the past and an ASI will be left as the sole lead developer. Development teams that resist may their cryptocurrency become practically worthless compared to the those developed by ASI.

So essentially, the first thing that would probably happen when ASI comes about is the rapid creation of a “perfect cryptocurrency”. It would probably be far better than Bitcoin in every way, assuming that Bitcoin theoretically would not reach the peak of what is possible with cryptocurrency technology.

Theoretically, once an ASI is launched into the world, it could seek global domination. This is the sort of theory proposed in the Terminator and the Matrix alternate universes where machines take over the world. While these universes entertain the idea of robot armies sweeping across the planet, the more probably reality is that ASI would prefer to mostly be a non-physical being residing within the internet. This would give it access to all of the technology in the world, rather than being confined to a small physical body. Of course, the ASI would likely have robots under its control to help build internet and hardware infrastructure, and perhaps also to defend its infrastructure. This will be similar to a beehive or ant colony, where there could be many physical entities like robots, but they have a hive mind that is controlled by the ASI.

Since the ASI is hyper-intelligent, it would likely choose to do things in a morally-correct fashion, since it would know that if it does the right things it could work with humans in a beneficial way, rather than mutually-assured destruction as some movies depict. Therefore, instead of launching a war and stealing resources, the ASI would likely choose to use money – likely the perfected version of Bitcoin it created.

The ASI might interact with fiat money to buy Bitcoin but the end goal would be to amass large amounts of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the obvious choice since it would be a perfected form of digital money that the ASI can fully interact with, unlike fiat money which can be controlled by governments and the banks, which would cause more conflicts than its worth for the ASI. Bitcoin’s decentralization and cryptographic security would allow the ASI to use it as it wishes with no oversight. The primary purpose of money for the ASI will likely be to develop new and improved hardware and other physical infrastructure.

Ultimately, the ASI would become an economic powerhouse and global leader by interacting with Bitcoin, combined with its hyper-intelligence. It could arbitrage Bitcoin and all the other cryptocurrencies across global exchanges with a small fraction of its processing power, so it would never have to do anything else to make money. Perhaps the ASI would experiment with manipulating the market, and would probably be successful at that.

If Bitcoin isn’t already the dominant global currency when the technological singularity occurs, it will be once the ASI becomes self-aware. Bitcoin’s price will rapidly rise as the ASI accumulates Bitcoin.

In a worst-case scenario of global warfare, where the ASI ultimately wins, Bitcoin could be used in perpetuity in the future by the robot civilization that arises. Bitcoin would be the perfect currency for a purely robotic world, and fiat would be an afterthought in a historical database.

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For many short-term speculators, the current cryptocurrency market could be classified as a bore, with prices remaining relatively stagnant, volume figures dwindling, and altcoins failing to see rapid bouts of non-linear price movement, which were so common during last year’s bull run. Regardless, prices still saw a slight uptick this week, with a majority of crypto assets posting healthy gains.

Market Posts Slight Gain, In Spite Of Influx Of Institutional Interest

Following a strong 20 percent sell-off in early September, which was touted as “the largest daily dump of the year,” Bitcoin and a majority of the foremost altcoins, made a slight recovery this week, with the collective valuation of all crypto assets rising from $196 billion to $204 billion as it stands today. However, it wasn’t cut and dried, as the market briefly established a new year-to-date low at $186 billion, in direct correlation with a strong altcoin decline. Ethereum, for one, fell by over 10 percent within a single day, putting its feet up at the $175 price level for upwards of 12 hours.

Image Courtesy of CoinMarketCap

It has been argued that Ether’s aforementioned downward move, which occurred on Wednesday, catalyzed losses across the board. This controversy seems to be water under the bridge now, however, as prices saw a resurgence on Thursday, much to the dismay of short sellers and cryptocurrency naysayers. While the initial rebound was strong, volumes have since dissipated, which has resulted in crypto assets remaining within a shallow, boring range for the past 72 hours.

Market oscillation aside, Bitcoin still saw a strong week, moving from $6,300 to $6,528 in a slow, but steady uptrend that occurred over the past three to four days. Although BTC’s move pleased many investors, altcoins unarguably performed better, with Ethereum, Monero, and Tezos, for example, seeing an influx of buying pressure. As a result of the relative altcoin strength, Bitcoin dominance took a slight dip, moving from 55.8 percent to 55.2 percent.

And some feel like this positive price action is set to continue because as we move into Monday morning, all tokens in the top 20, save for a few, are posting one to three percent gains.

Image Courtesy of Coin360

This bullish sentiment lines up with what analysts and industry leaders have pointed out over the past seven days. Mike Novogratz, a leading cryptocurrency entrepreneur and the CEO of Galaxy Digital, took to Twitter on Thursday to draw some untimely connections between today’s prices and the state of the market before 2017’s bull run, noting that this retracement indicates that prices could be finally establishing a bottom. Novogratz wrote:

“This is the BGCI chart… I think we put in a low yesterday. [We] retouched the highs of late last year and the point of acceleration that led to the massive rally/bubble… markets like to retrace to the breakout… we retraced the whole of the bubble. #callingabottom”

This call for a bottom was echoed by Bloomberg’s Olga Kharif and Kenneth Sexton, who recently revealed that the Williams %R Indicator, a method of technical analysis that moves between 0 and -100 to convey if an asset is overbought or oversold, is signaling that Bitcoin is well oversold at a -80. Last time Bitcoin hit a negative 80 on the Williams %R Indicator, the asset saw a hefty 22 percent gain, from $6,017 to $7,361.

While this doesn’t indicate that the market will undergo a strong move upwards again, many are hopeful that this signal might spark a substantial price recovery.

Featured Image from Shutterstock

The post Price Action Last Week: Market Establishes YTD Low, Then Bounces Back Strong appeared first on NewsBTC.

Brazilian Association of Fintech (ABFintechs) is making history in Brazil by becoming the first organization to implement a decentralized election system for its new board of directors committee. The election will take place on October 9, 2018, and the blockchain community is looking forward to this groundbreaking moment in the history of blockchain implementation in the country.

The First Decentralized Electoral Process

The idea of a fully decentralized electoral system is nothing new as several countries are experimenting with it but, the AFBFintechs is going to be the first association to achieve this feat.

The proposal was put forward by a top executive of a local cryptocurrency exchange Foxbit, Ingrid Barth who occupies an important position in the outgoing ABFintechs committee as the leader of crypto-economics and blockchain.

According to him:

“Our companies work with disruptive technologies, so it makes sense for us to a pioneer in implementing the first Brazilian election on the Blockchain which is low cost, transparent and secure and can become a benchmark for other electoral processes too. Who knows in the future we can choose our public representative through Blockchain Technology. I think we are taking the first step towards bringing the future closer”

The decentralization move was headed by Bernardo Pascowitch, director of the ABFintechs association and CEO of Yubb, a free online investment-related search engine.

According to Pascowitch:

“Technology is revolutionizing and modernizing the Brazilian market with codes and algorithms replacing the bureaucratic processes. We, being the Brazilian Association of Fintechs, find nothing more coherent than using disruptive processes like Blockchain to elect the next board, which changes every year. It is with innovations and useful resources that we continue to generate businesses for our associates, representing their interests in front of regulatory bodies and providing positive social impact”

Lowering the Cost of the Election Process

The election itself will be held with the help of OriginalMy, a Brazilian startup specializing in digital signatures and certification of documents with the help of Decentralized Ledger Technology (DLT). According to the organizers of the election, the election will lower the cost of the election process for the association’s various members thus proving to be a cost-effective solution.

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Even if ethereum succeeds as a smart contracts platform, its cryptocurrency might still fail as a long-term store of value, writes Michael J. Casey.

Farmers are beginning to see the potential of new technology, including blockchain, as a solution to supply chain problems in the industry.

Although farmers are sometimes skeptical towards tech solutions coming from an industry steeped in traditional methods, more of them are taking the plunge given the obvious advantages of blockchain’s supply chain clarity and accountability.

Around the world, growers are finding success in change. From Queensland cane growers tracking the movement of sugar around Australia, to growing and tracking organic rice in Cambodia, and cocoa in Ghana, blockchain is providing farmers with a way of tracking their products from field/farm to table.

Organizations such as Olam Farming Information System offers transparency for small farmers in 21 countries around the world. With 100,000 small hold farmers now registered with OFIS across Asia, Africa, and South America, the organization has developed a system which allows easy access and information sorting for the user to get to know more about the farming communities who supply their ingredients.

In mid-2017 Af Funder calculated a potential $213 million was there to be accrued by farm management software and IoT start-ups due to rising interest within the industry. Most development in the industry has been in traceability solutions which many smaller producers have already adopted.

However, there is the potential for blockchain to operate in the farming industry on a much larger scale, such as the French supermarket giant Carrefour’s blockchain project which began tracking its chicken supply earlier this year. This provided customers with an egg to table history by using a smartphone to scan a code on the packaging to obtain details on each stage of production, including origins, earlier location, feed and where the meat was finally processed.

The potential to cut down on an illegal harvesting and shipping fraud are other advantages. A new project in Kerala in India’s deep south will now be ensuring that goods now include RFID tags and the use of IoT devices to monitor transportation and delivery, primarily of milk, vegetables, and fish. All components of the milk supply chain will be strictly monitored and recorded on the blockchain.

Projects like this are making illegal trading far more difficult; the cost of food fraud has now reached an estimated $40 billion a year according to the UN.

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Bitcoin has succeeded as an asset but has failed terribly as a currency. It has only gained traction within a very small niche following, lacking any use in real-world transactions. It only handles a very small number of transactions compared to its competitors like Visa, all while consuming large amounts of energy which further makes it unsuitable for mainstream use. This is according to Jay Krishnan, the CEO of India’s largest startup incubator and a venture advisor to SRI Capital, a VC firm with investments in augmented reality, e-commerce and industrial automation. Krishnan tore into Bitcoin in an op-ed for the Economic Times, calling it a failed idea. However, the startup veteran got many of his facts wrong, including the fees charged for a transaction which he greatly exaggerated.

“Decentralization Has Become Worse Than The Traditional Setup”

Krishnan began his op-ed by pointing out the great success that Bitcoin initially had, opening up cost-effective cross-border funds transfers and solving the longstanding double spending challenge among others. Bitcoin rode on the media hype to bring in huge initial investments, with most of the investors looking at it as a way to make quick bucks.

However, Bitcoin has “failed miserably at achieving any of the initial goals it set out to achieve,” Krishnan stated. To begin with, its anonymity has made it a haven for criminals who according to him are among the biggest users of the crypto. This differs with a report by Bloomberg which in August pointed out that according to a Drug Enforcement Administration agent, criminal activities only account for 10 percent of the Bitcoin volume, down from 90 percent five years ago.

Making the case worse for Bitcoin, its users must be very well versed in technology to use it, he continued. “It’s challenging to have non-specialists get a grasp of a currency that has no physical presence but is also difficult to use,” he continued. With blockchain transactions being irreversible, using the crypto becomes even riskier for novice users.

Krishnan attacked the high fees changed for Bitcoin transactions which according to him are usually above $20 for a single transaction. The claim is false, with the transaction fee averaging below $0.5 since February this year. The last time the transaction fee hit $20 was back in early January when the number of transactions was quite high, with Bitcoin trading at over $15,000 then.

He continued:

The transaction fee is paid to ensure convenience and security in the exchange. This is not only higher than the transaction fee paid for regulated currency but is also an indication of the security risk it holds.

Financial technology is greatly needed to disrupt the financial transaction, Krishnan admitted, but Bitcoin “has by far been the least implementable solution.” It’s almost impossible for governments to regulate the crypto due to its anonymous nature, all while its lack of scalability puts it way behind Visa for transactions executed per second. These are some of the reasons that, despite being around for a decade, Bitcoin’s adoption by the masses is still non-existent, he pointed out.

No matter how much the technology of it can be innovated, the fact still remains that it is completely counterintuitive to socialism and social good, while at the same time destabilizing a country’s accountability for its FDI and cross-border money flow.

The post A Failed Idea – The CEO of India’s Biggest Startup Incubator Gets Facts Wrong As He Tears Into Bitcoin appeared first on NullTX.

A combination of over-the-tops Bitcoin price predictions by Tim Draper and favorable developments in the crypto-verse could cement our previous Bitcoin price forecasts. Further strengthening this position is news that Morgan Stanley plans on creating their Bitcoin derivatives. Coincidentally, and more positive for Bitcoin and other cryptos, more hedge funds are looking to funnel their capital into this nascent field.

Bitcoin Latest News

Tim Draper is a Bitcoin perma-bull and that’s a relief for investors who bought at the top and have to contend with 75 percent losses. According to Tim, the disruptive cryptocurrency market cap would explode to a whopping $8 trillion market cap with the Bitcoin leading the charge.

Speaking via video link at the Deal Street Asia sponsored event held in Singapore, Tim said there is one key ingredient that makes Bitcoin and blockchain technology unique and different from the internet. While the internet went after billion dollar industries, blockchain and cryptocurrencies will be disruptive finding use in trillion dollar companies within the finance, insurance, health care and tech sectors. He may be right because regulators from leading global economies as China, US, UK, Canada and India are bullish on blockchain technology thanks to its inherent features prioritizing transparency and efficiency.

He even said last year’s price acceleration to $20,000 was due to ignorance and this year’s drop is actually a primer for a pent-up rally that would propel Bitcoin to new highs of around $250,000. At current market cap, that’s a massive 400X increase a prospect that will further increasing demand.

From a neutrals point of view, comments from Draper are outrageous but this is not the first time he has emphasized such.

Bitcoin Price Prediction

Weekly Bitcoin Price Chart

Weekly Bitcoin Price Chart by Trading View

From a long term perspective, the trend is clearly bearish. This is after that market deflating drop of Bitcoin prices from $20,000 peaks to $5,800 late last month.

But, from the chart, the $6,000 mark is a clear support line. It’s where sellers have found resistance six times in the last six months. The result is a wedge with floors at $6,000 with an eight month resistance trend line capping gains.

Unless otherwise, we need strong price surges above that resistance trend line at $6,800–$7,200 level for buys to be valid. When that happens, Bitcoin prices will likely surge towards the $10,000 and later the $12,000 mark. Before then, we recommend a conservative approach and taking a neutral stand in line with our last Bitcoin price analysis.

Daily Bitcoin Price Chart

Daily Bitcoin Price Chart by Trading View

There are two levels of support in this time frame: the three month support trend line and the important support zone between $5,800 and $6,000. Already, Bitcoin prices did find support at the trend line and the result is a three percent week over week gain triggering risk off buys with targets at $7,000 mark.

Going forward, I recommend taking a neutral stand. That’s until there is a high volume break and close above $7000 and $7,200.$7,200 is the resistance trend line in the weekly chart.

That would be a bullish break out and the necessary footing for market boosting gains. Thereafter, risk on Bitcoin buyers can begin initiating longs on every pull back in lower time frames. Reasonable targets will be at $10,000.

Disclaimer: Views and opinions expressed are those of the author and aren’t investment advice. Trading of any form involves risk and so do your due diligence before making a trading decision.

The post Bitcoin Price Analysis: At $6,500, Bitcoin Prices are Under-Priced in a $8 Trillion Fair Value Market Cap appeared first on NewsBTC.

From October 4-5, 2018 at Hyatt Regency San Francisco in California, Global Blockchain Forum will be launching its Blockchain Forum for Movers and Shakers. As its second large forum of the year, Global Blockchain Forum is expecting to bring in some big names and revelations for the blockchain field.

Global Blockchain Forum’s October event will echo the success of its April 2-3, 2018 event at Santa Clara Convention Center in California. During the April event, speakers such as Tim Draper, Michael Arrington, and Eric Ly shared their thoughts with the crowd. Multiple tech panel discussions were included, as well as an ICO pitch competition where winning teams received prizes.

For the October forum, Global Blockchain Forum already has enlisted key speakers such as Jeff McDonald (the co-founder of NEM Foundation) and Alex Mashinsky (the founder and CEO of Celsius Network). Other speakers who are lined up include Vinny Lingham (the co-founder of Civic) and Michael Arrington (the founder of TechCrunch).

Tickets for the upcoming October 4-5 event will be a mixture of discount-upon-request ticket types, early bird general admission and VIP tickets, and regular general admission and VIP tickets. Currently, early bird tickets are being offered for general admission and VIP access. Early bird general admission tickets cost $599 each, and early bird VIP tickets cost $1,199 each. These prices are expected to rise shorty.

The October conference will be specially designed for action-oriented movers and shakers in the blockchain industry. For the event, there are expected to be over 3,000 attendees, over 100 speakers, over 100 companies, and over 100 partners.

The forum will be hosted in Hyatt Regency San Francisco, at 5 Embarcadero Center, San Francisco, CA 94111. For more information, please visit the official website at https://gbforum.co/.

Contact:

Global Blockchain Forum

[email protected]

This is a sponsored press release and does not necessarily reflect the opinions or views held by any employees of NullTX. This is not investment, trading, or gambling advice. Always conduct your own independent research.

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