BITCOIN

Catalysts Coming

210 days since last #bitcoin peak…about same amount of time it took to reclaim $266 peak in 2013. Catalysts coming… – TwoBitIdiot

Real Institutional Investment Coming

Bitcoin cover story in latest issue of Banking New York magazine (distributed to 7,500 banking execs): http://issuu.com/thewarrengroup/docs/bankingny2q2014 – Barry Silbert, Chairman of Second Market & CEO of Bitcoin Investment Trust

Singapore sovereign wealth fund experiments with Bitcoin. Temasek Holdings has a $172bn portfolio and had a net income of $12.1bn in 2013.

Several elements within other large banks and financial institutions are known to be interested in cryptocurrency and keen to invest in bitcoin companies, but none have admitted it openly and most still balk at any mention of their name in the same sentence as ‘bitcoin’ – Jon Southurst

On the Wall Street front, I can’t tell you how many days a week I’m doing speaking and meetups with global banks. It is going to happen. We’re at an inflection point where we’re going to see some real institutional money move into this space – Barry Silbert

What we’re hearing is that some of the big broker dealers on Wall Street are setting up small trading desks just to get exposure to the asset and understand it. That’s the approach now as opposed to a year ago when people thought governments would never allow it, and banks just wanted it to go away. All of the major banks now have teams trying to make sense of bitcoin.

A year ago, most governments and big banks frankly just wanted bitcoin to go away. They were like: ‘this is a joke, I want this to go away. I’m just going to ignore it.’ It’s not going to go away. So now people are saying: ‘it’s not going away and there’s big money coming into this, this is a real innovation, we need to get our heads wrapped around it, and we need to figure out whatever rules we’re going to wrap around it – Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle

ALTCOINS

Litecoin

Litecoin price appears to be decoupling from bitcoin. Money rotating out of Litecoin to bitcoin and other alts? – Barry Silbert

Fallacy of “asic-resistance” now obv, plus new crop of anon coins has ppl asking why clone/tweak like LTC has value. #finally – Dan McArdle

CryptoNote Technology

CryptoNote is an open-source technology that allows the creation of supposedly anonymous cryptocurrencies.

CryptoNote currency market caps:

Bytecoin $8,201,000

Monero $4,4270,000

Boolberry $470,000

duckNote $67,000

– Lee Banfield

EQUITIES

S&P500

S&P500 is now at all time high on the news of an economy that collapsed 2.9%. Rigged markets? Nothing to see here, move along peasants – Andreas Antonopoulos

Western Union (WU)

When the reserve bank issues bitcoin and when it is regulated we would be more than happy [to use bitcoin] – Hikmet Ersek, CEO of Western Union

When the reserve bank issues bitcoin? The ignorance is astonishing for a man in his position. This company’s days are numbered. – Lee Banfield

COMPANIES / PROJECTS

BitPesa

BitPesa which uses Bitcoin as the backbone for remittances makes launches in Kenya to help the unbanked.

Traditional money transmitters, like Western Union, MoneyGram and WorldRemit, charge anywhere between 6% and 13%, applicable to all Kenyans wishing to send money home

BitPesa, on the other hand, will charge a flat rate of 3% regardless of transaction size; the service, while it relies on bitcoin, doesn’t view itself as a strictly bitcoin company. CEO Elizabeth Rossiello tells the Wall Street Journal that “we are taking bitcoin, translating it into the local currency, and dispersing it the way people know.”

The startup focuses on the fact that the majority of Kenyans now own mobile smartphones, making it a likely place to start in assisting the world’s predominantly unbanked – Hugh Starr

Bitcoin / Open-Source Projects

It’s pretty hard to find any important computer science development over the past 20 years that wasn’t an open-source project

Probably 10,000 of the best developers in the world are working on the bitcoin project. Because they are not sitting in a building called Bitcoin Incorporated people seem to miss that point

We bet on computer science innovation and since this is how computer science innovation happens today, this is the kind of stuff we bet on. I certainly wouldn’t want to bet against the 10,000 smartest people

You read these criticisms that ‘bitcoin has this flaw and bitcoin has that flaw,’ and we’re like ‘Well, great. Bitcoin has 10,000 people working hard on that’

Bitcoin is like the Internet, which is also designed to be a distributed system that can withstand large-scale attacks … so, unlike Lehman Brothers and our financial system it didn’t need a master bailout. The distributed system operated as advertised – Chris Dixon, Partner at Andreessen Horowitz

PLACES

USA

Eugenics is the hope to plan the gene pool just as socialism planned the economy.

It’s probably not possible fully to grasp the rise of leviathan in the 20th century without coming to terms with the eugenics movement, which produced our own home-grown holocaust.

In American education and popular culture, people don’t hear much about this at all. It is the great non-event to most school kids. Everyone acts as if this stuff was unique to the Nazis, and surely we’ve already gotten rid of those weird people.

The movement was funded by the foundations established from Gilded Age fortunes: Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Harriman. The academic journals in every field — politics, economics, anthropology, biology, sociology — were packed with proposals from immigration policy to sterilization to outright extermination.

The schools taught the idea: a documented 376 university courses advocated it, and tens of thousands of students took the courses. The ambition was to wipe out undesirable recessive genes in one generation. We now have massive access to archives, and a solid shelf of literature, that tell the full and ugly truth about what was going on.

All fashionable opinion endorsed it. Historians of this period commented on just how remarkable it is that there were few if any dissenters at all, anywhere in the academic journals. It was the prevailing ideology of the time — however taboo this subject might be today.

They speak of superior and inferior blood, the preservation of the white race, the need to block inferiors from reproducing. I always figured that these were anomalous opinions, appearing here and there among a handful of malicious types. Not so. The whole of academia was shot through with this stuff.

Eugenics guru Charles B. Davenport — Harvard and Chicago and the best the profession had to offer — established the American Breeder’s Institute to become the most influential think tank for policy. They worked the political world hard. By 1935, more than half the states had compulsory sterilization laws. California was the worst: it forcibly sterilized 10,000 “mental defectives.” In the decades before World War II, states compulsorily sterilized some 100,000 people.

How easy it is to sweep all of this grim history under the carpet, blaming the Nazis and Hitler and imagining that “we” had nothing to do with it. In fact, it is all part of the deep history of the 20th century, a horrid stain on elite academia, and also a warning about the unity of science and the state.

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (2003) by Edwin Black

– Jeffrey Tucker

THE SINGULARITY

Drones

A Russian fast food chain claims to have taken a slice out of the competition by becoming the first to offer pizza delivery by drone

“We already sold six pizzas in one and a half hours using a drone, it is a real business model,” manager Ilya Farafonov told AFP.

“You should see the faces of people when their pizza arrives from the sky, it’s like magic,” he added – AFPRelaxnews

Here’s a crazy idea. How about US govt not block new industries? FAA grounds Amazon’s drone delivery plans – Michael Robertson

Moore’s Law in 3D Printing

Over the past several months, the world’s largest 3D printer manufacturer, 3D Systems, has used the phrase on several occasions to describe progress in 3D printing speeds that we’ve seen in the last decade.

Back in November of last year, Avi Reichental, the company’s CEO, stated the following, after comparing the industry’s progress to Moore’s law, “Printers are going to double up on performance and double down on costs. Expect printers to become real powerful home appliances. The train has left the station.”

A company called Local Motors is planning to 3D print an actual car in Chicago this September. They expect the process to take around 5-6 days. If what 3D Systems predicts, becomes reality, that same car will only take about four and a half hours to print in a decade’s time.

Such an accomplishment would have far reaching implications throughout the manufacturing world, and if you extrapolate numbers even further, past the 10 year horizon, things become almost scary – Brian Krassenstein

Telepresence / Snowdenbot

The futility of geographic occupancy limitations in a telepresence world? http://www.wired.com/2014/06/inside-edward-snowdens-life-as-a-robot/

What will be the purpose & justification for immigration restrictions in a world with ubiquitous, ultra-hi-def, free telepresence? – Marc Andreessen, Co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz

For at least the past three months, Snowden and his supporters have been experimenting with a Beam Pro remote presence system, a Wi-Fi-connected screen and camera on wheels that Snowden can use to communicate with the staffers in the New York office of the American Civil Liberties Union, according to his ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner.

From a computer in Moscow, Snowden can turn on the video bot and wheel around the ACLU’s office on a whim.

“He’s used it to roll out into the hallway and generously interact with large numbers of ACLU staff,” says Wizner. “I think it can be a profound response to exile.”

Once, the non-profit’s executive director Anthony Romero gave the Snowden-possessed machine a walking tour of the building. Another time, Wizner had to jump on a phone call during a meeting with his whistleblower client. When he got off the phone, he found that Snowden had rolled the bot into civil liberties lawyer Jameel Jaffer’s office and was discussing the 702 provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. “It was kind of cool,” Wizner says.

Trevor Timm, the director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation where Snowden sits on the board, says Snowden had been interested in trying the telepresence bot even before his TED talk.

“He was telling people for a while that it could be this game-changing technology,” says Timm. “I don’t think anyone quite believed him until we saw it in action…All he needs is arms to open doors, and he can go wherever he wants.”

Glenn Greenwald wrote that he’d like to see the robot unleashed in the NSA parking lot

– Andy Greenberg

1Jwh6nZiASJf4d3hNytjxqiimWBmEJvJ4S