BITCOIN

Potential in the Gambling Capital of the World

There is a new Bitcoin ATM inside the Sands Casino in Macau, the gambling capital of the world! #China – Roger Ver

Bypassing Beijing Capital Controls

Chinese can buy London property with bitcoin.

“We believe that [China] could be a large market, simply because of the [mainland’s] currency restriction,” said Richard Mathieson, chairman and managing director of Cai-Capital.

Mathieson said one of his Hong Kong clients was buying a London home for £1 million (HK$13 million) and the other was picking up a flat for £750,000 – Peggy Sito

Networks and Hierarchies

To all the world’s states, democratic and undemocratic alike, the new informational, commercial, and social networks of the internet age pose a profound challenge, the scale of which is only gradually becoming apparent.

1) First email achieved a dramatic improvement in the ability of ordinary citizens to communicate with one another.

2) Then the internet came to have an even greater impact on the ability of citizens to access information. The emergence of search engines marked a quantum leap in this process.

3) The advent of laptops, smartphones, and other portable devices then emancipated electronic communication from the desktop.

4) With the explosive growth of social networks came another great leap, this time in the ability of citizens to share information and ideas

5) The efforts of Anonymous, Wikileaks and Edward Snowden to disrupt the system of official secrecy, directed mainly against the U.S. government, have changed everything.

6) The most recent, and perhaps most important, network challenge to hierarchy comes with the advent of virtual currencies and payment systems like Bitcoin.

It remains to be seen how big a challenge Bitcoin poses to the system of national fiat currencies that has evolved since the 1970s and, in particular, how big a challenge it poses to the “exorbitant privilege” enjoyed by the United States as the issuer of the world’s dominant reserve (and transaction) currency. But it would be unwise to assume, as some do, that it poses no challenge at all. – Niall Ferguson, Professor of History at Harvard

MINING

Mining Rig Obsolescence

The overall network hash rate has been doubling every 3-4 weeks, and therefore, mining equipment has been losing half its production capability within the same time frame.

After 21-28 weeks (7 halvings), mining rigs lose 99.3% of their value. So there is very high equipment turnover in the mining industry – Ittay Eyal & Emin Gun Sirer

MegaBigPower

Together with the rise of large mining pools, bitcoin has also seen the consolidation of mining equipment into large industrial mines, some of which – like MegaBigPower in the US – have been estimated to churn out $8m a month in bitcoin at peak prices – Daniel Cawrey

ALTCOINS

The Dominant Anonymous Coin

My thesis is that LTC slowly bleeds market-cap to whatever the dominant anon-coin ends up being over the course of 1-3yrs – Dan McArdle

EQUITIES

Frontier Markets

The number of companies on Cambodia’s stock exchange doubled on Monday – to two.

While neighbouring Vietnam has seen around 660 companies go public since the opening of its first bourse in 2000, both Cambodia and Laos, which has three listed firms, have failed to live up to early expectations that came when their exchanges opened for business in 2011

The MSCI frontier markets index is up almost 15 percent so far this year, against a 5 percent rise in the MSCI emerging markets index

Vietnam’s benchmark index was Southeast Asia’s best performer last year, rising 22 percent and while it took a bit of a knock last month on tensions with China, it is still up 14 percent for the year to date. It has a market cap of $47 billion, though that still pales in comparison to emerging markets like Thailand whose benchmark has a market value of around $400 billion – Prak Chan Thul & Lawrence White

Laos

Asian Frontier markets offer attractive dividend yields and low Price to Earnings and Price to Book ratios.

* Laos (LSXC)

P/E = 9.2

P/B = 1.3

Dividend Yield = 8%

– Thomas Hugger, AFC Asia Frontier Fund

COMPANIES / PROJECTS

Keybase

Keybase is a very VERY big deal: https://keybase.io – Beautyon

Made in Space

By putting a 3D printer on the Space Station, we’re going to be able to almost instantly put things in space. Once we have the file down here, we’ll be able to instantly send it up. Hit a button, and we’ll be able to put things on the Space Station in a matter of minutes to hours instead of months to years – Mike Chen, Made in Space Chief Scientific Officer

Civic Crowdfunding

While most of the action in crowdfunding has been around private entrepreneurial projects, recently there’s been growing interest in Kickstarter-like campaigns for civic ideas. Sites such as Citizinvestor, Neighbor.ly, and IOBY let governments or individuals propose projects like parks, swimming pools, and festivals and potentially open up whole new sources of investment for public goods – Ben Schiller

This is a glimpse into how a free society would function. Projects cannot continue to be funded by coercion (taxes). If “governments” want to raise money, they will have to convince the rightful owners of the money to voluntarily fund their ideas. Alan Greenspan’s claim that force is needed because of the free rider problem is wrong. People still buy fireworks even though their neighbors are able to watch them for free. Kickstarter now funds more art projects than the National Endowment for Arts. If they are really necessary, enough people will voluntarily pay for “pubic goods” without being coerced – Lee Banfield

PLACES

Iceland

By your estimation, which modern government has the most transparency?

For a small government, Iceland – Julian Assange

USA

The way that the inflation rate is calculated has been changed more than 20 times since the 1970s, and at this point it bears so little relation to reality that it is essentially meaningless.

Anyone that has to regularly pay for food, water, gas, electricity or anything else knows that inflation is too high. In fact, if inflation was calculated the same way that it was back in 1980, the inflation rate would be close to 10 percent right now – Tyler Durden

THE SINGULARITY

Computing

The overriding sense is we’re taking the next step in the evolution of computing. Over several decades computers have progressed from feeble room-sized counting machines to desktop computers, laptops, smartphones and tablets.

The trend? Smaller, cheaper, more powerful, and more distributed. As Jason Pontin, editor in chief and publisher of MIT Technology Review, noted, “Computing is disappearing into the things around us. Computing is becoming as invisible and ubiquitous as electricity.” – Jason Dorrier

Voice Recognition

Tim Tuttle, CEO and founder of Expect Labs, said in the last 18 months, voice recognition accuracy improved 30%—a bigger gain than the entire decade previous. A third of searches are now being done using voice commands.

Voice recognition uses machine learning algorithms that depend on people actually using them to get better. Tuttle believes we’re at the beginning of a virtuous cycle wherein wider adoption is yielding more data; more data translates into better performance; better performance results in wider adoption, more data, and so on – Jason Dorrier

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