“Code is law,” as described in Lawrence Lessig’s book ‘Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace’, refers to the idea that computer code has progressively established itself as a predominant way to regulate behavior to the same degree as legal code.
With the advent of blockchain technology, code is assuming an even stronger role in regulating people’s interactions.
However, while computer code can enforce rules more efficiently than legal code, it also comes with a series of limitations.
Even years into the deployment of the internet, many believed that it was still a fad. Of course, the internet has since become a major influence on our lives, from how we buy goods and services, to the ways we socialize with friends, to the Arab Spring, to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Yet, in the 1990s, the mainstream press scoffed when Nicholas Negroponte predicted that most of us would soon be reading our news online rather than from a newspaper.
Fast forward two decades: Will we soon be seeing a similar impact from cryptocurrencies and blockchains? There are certainly many parallels. Like the internet, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are driven by advances in core technologies along with a new, open architecture — the Bitcoin blockchain. Like the internet, this technology is designed to be decentralized, with “layers,” where each layer is defined by an interoperable open protocol on top of which companies, as well as individuals, can build products and services. Like the internet, in the early stages of development there are many competing technologies, so it’s important to specify which blockchain you’re talking about. And, like the internet, blockchain technology is strongest when everyone is using the same network, so in the future we might all be talking about “the” blockchain.
The alleged lack of available talent for blockchain industry jobs was high on the agenda at the DTCC’s Fintech Symposium, held at the Grand Hyatt in New York City yesterday.
There, executives from a wide range of companies took turns addressing an audience of several hundred financial industry executives to express their concern about what they believe is a problem preventing wider growth and use of the technology.
In a major price surge, Dash has nearly doubled market cap over the last month, overtaking Litecoin and Monero to become the fourth most valued cryptocurrency.
This week one year ago, Dash was the #7 ranked cryptocurrency with a market cap of about $23 mln. This number grew steadily over the course of the year, finishing out the year with a market cap of $69 mln and maintained #7 ranking. Over the course of 2017 so far, however, Dash’s growth has significantly picked up steam, exceeding $100 mln over January. This month Dash has risen to a nearly $200 mln market cap, currently with a value of over $27 and 0.23 Bitcoin at present time.
2016 was a banner year for artificial intelligence. Alpha Go’s victory over Lee Sedol was perhaps one of the most important, but we saw advancements in self-driving cars, the continued embrace of bots and personal assistants for retail, adoption and competition around in-house assistants like Amazon Echo, along with frequent, sometimes weekly, breakthroughs on the academic side, mainly relating to machine learning. With the biggest tech companies in the world–Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and others–devoting more and more resources to AI, the momentum is going to increase.
The virtual currency has continued its breathtaking rise surging past $1,000, after already winning the crown of the best-performing currency in 2016 by more than doubling its value in the course of the year.
A few months ago The Washington Post reported that Facebook collects 98 data points on each of its nearly 2 billion users. Among this 98 are ethnicity, income, net worth, home value, if you are a mother, if you are a soccer mom, if you are married, the number of lines of credit you have, if you are interested in Ramadan, when you bought your car, and on and on and on.
The internet is about to become a vicious, chaotic battlefield, and Elon Musk says advanced A.I. could make the carnage even worse. According to a short exchange on Musk’s Twitter today, the systems that keep the internet running are particularly vulnerable to simple, brute-force computing attacks — the kind of cyberwarfare that artificial intelligence excel at.
Venezuela’s currency has lost so much of its value that people have given up on counting the notes—they just weigh piles of cash. So far this year, the bolívar has lost nearly half its value compared to the dollar, while inflation has shot up as much as 15 times. That’s according to best estimates, since official data isn’t available.
Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet. These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. We don’t know who is doing this, but it feels like a large nation state. China or Russia would be my first guesses.
IBM’s previously announced work intersecting blockchain and AI is moving forward with the establishment of a new office in Germany.
The announcement is part of a broader technology push initiated this week by IBM, which is investing $200m to fuel its internet of things (IoT) efforts.
