Lifeboat Foundation

What is Bitcoin?

Sure—You know the history. As it spread from the geeky crypto community, Bitcoin sparked investor frenzy. Its “value” was driven by the confidence of early adopters that they hitched a ride on an early train, rather than commercial adoption. But, just like those zealous investors, you realize that it may ultimately reduce the costs of online commerce, if and when if it becomes widely accepted.

But what is Bitcoin, really? To what class of instruments does it belong?

• Ardent detractors see a sham: A pyramid scheme with no durable value; a house of cards waiting to tumble. This is the position of J.D, an IRS auditor who consults to The Cryptocurrency Standards Association. As devil’s advocate, he keeps us grounded.

Continue reading “Bitcoin Adoption: Series of reactions” »

“The fifty-eighth session of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space will be held from 10–19 June 2015 at the United Nations Office at Vienna, Vienna International Center, Vienna, Austria.”

Read more

” “Following these rules, we’ve demonstrated that we can make all the universal logic gates used in electronics, simply by changing the layout of the bars on the chip,” said Katsikis. “The actual design space in our platform is incredibly rich. Give us any Boolean logic circuit in the world, and we can build it with these little magnetic droplets moving around.”

Continue reading “Stanford engineers develop a computer that operates on water droplets — By Bjorn Carey | Stanford News” »

“‘When you’re seeking to preserve a historic house, there may be layers, it may have been lived in by many different people. Mount Vernon had been lived in by George Washington’s descendants, so they made a decision to restore it to George Washington’s time and erase this later history. Do you make the same kind of decision with games?’” Read more

The biggest round of applause at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote yesterday didn’t come when the company announced new versions of iOS and OS X, or even the new Apple Music service. It came when Apple’s vice president of engineering Craig Federighi announced that the company will open source the next version of its programming language Swift.

Why the excitement? Developers have demonstrated a growing preference for open source tools and platforms over the past 15 years. Apple, meanwhile, has pushed iOS developers towards its own in-house development technologies and away from third-party tools, such as Adobe Flash, that it deems inefficient. But even Apple can only risk alienating the developers on whom it relies for so many third-party apps and services so far. Coders have myriad options available to let them do their jobs the way they want; to keep them in-house, it turns out, Apple has to open up. Read more

Vannevar Bush’s prediction, half a century later, rings true: “The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.”

Read more

Technically Incorrect: A New Zealand-based company says it’s building a very, very angry robot to help companies deal with angry customers.

Read more

When I probed Thrun about what a Nanodegree would actually deliver for someone who finished the program, he pointed me to the new Android Nanodegree announced on-stage at Google I/O. “If you finish this [Google Android Nanodegree], and you get a Nanodegree for Android Developer, then you are basically employable as an Android developer — as a top-notch Android developer.” Read more

My latest article for Vice Motherboard. It’s about consciousness and a so-called ‘Turing Test’ that superintelligence might one day use on humans:

Read more