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Sunday, 28 June 2015

Zyber and Amplifying Growth from Technology

Why is it that we say that developed countries can't sustain 5% growth? In economics theory, technology saturation, diminishing returns on investment, limited resources and disrupted innovation in corporations come to mind. My economist friends say people reach a state of comfort, but comfort is comparative. I like to separate the concept in to two categories, physical and psychological. This is important as psychological problems can be approached in a much different way. I argue that the physical barriers may not be as they seem.

Why couldn't investment ontop of investment create a better return? Why cant a technology bringing together other technologies provide a greater result than what technologies do alone? I argue that there can be synergy in technology in highly developed economy. I feel that it may be that we are only just entering a truly technological world and that it is possible that the growth from technology can be compounding even exponential. Technology is amplified in a technology rich world.

Conventional though is

1 unit of tech + 1 unit of tech - 0.25 superseded industry = 1.75 units of growth

I propose that its possible for

(1 unit of tech + 1 unit of tech - 0 superseded industry) x amplifications factor = 2.5 units of growth

Scarcity is a big factor of the economics of the past. The world has limited physical resources to be converted to growth. Scarcity however becomes less relevant in the future in a world where information is mined and we don't rely on physical things for growth. We can see new dynamics already appearing with zero marginal costs, the sharing economy and the internet of things.

I was discussing this with over a drink and a friend bought up the the subject of the lack of significant developments in recent years.The internet, 3D printing and driver-less cars, three things, and that's it.  Compare that with the automobile, the jet engine and the nuclear reactor of yesteryear and with nomral perception we seem to be falling behind.

I would add the automation of the financial system (as allowed through crypto-currency) to our list of big recent developments. but as with bitcoins it isn't the invention itself but the utilisation that is the key to growth. The full benefit to the motor car isn't actualised until everyone uses one and this is still growing today. Perception is key when converting inventive technology to economic quality of life.

I propose that the invention of a car that can drive itself provides more efficiencies than that of the original automobile. This because more time will be saved and it allows more new business models across what is now a larger infrastructure. The new challenge becomes converting time and business models to growth. This contrast the straight resource conversion of old economics.

One example of technological synergy comes when your combine a mobile internet gps technology Uber and the developing Google Self-Driving Car. Uber provides an efficient taxi service allowing cab drivers to respond dynamically to demand and self manage. Google Chauffeur automates the act of driving. The developments do overlap. There are diminishing returns across the technologies but when the concepts are combined we get a dynamically responsive and automated transport system. A revolution in transport. I call this 'Zyber' and it can be used for more than just taxi rides, imagine miniature courier vans even buses, trucks and planes. I argue that in this case and cases like it technologies come together to equal more than the sum of there parts.

Labour is the main cost for Uber as it is with many companies. With driver-less cars the Uber service which is already very cost effective would be overwhelmingly cheaper than owning your own driver-less car. It will come with other benefits like not having to pay for parking and convenient vehicle choice.

($40b Uber + $100b Google Chauffeur - $90b superseded industry) x 20 amplification factor = $1000b Zyber growth

Efficiency doesn't necessarily equally growth. What happened to the porters and horses when the car was invented? With Zyber, car parking buildings and car sales will go down per capita. The superseded part of the economy will be huge. but part of what new technology has done is allowed us to fill these gaps more quickly than before. Car park buildings are converted to apartments and assembly lines practice JIT delivery. Modern stock markets redistribute capitol more quickly than before and start ups are seeded internationally over the internet. 3D printers that are used to print a car radiators don't care if they now have to print aircraft parts. Through technology we can see that superseded industry is replaced more and more quickly. I predict that we will see a lot of this  in the future which can actually open up the economy to growth.

The main point is of the effect on the existing infrastructure. Infrastructure in a way could also be called technology. In the case of Zyber, the massive infrastructure of roads will be amplified. The economic effect being the same a that of large infrastructure spending. I argue that the same thing will happening when bitcoin leverages on the growing internet and that this type of synergy will be seen more often in the future.

The world has changed and we need to look carefully to see that the technology is impressive. With new thinking we can find resources in technological places that can provide new profits and growth from unexpected places. The idea that technology can leverage against existing technology better than against non technologies is exciting and positive for future growth. Bitcoin and the internet are definitely part of these amplifying technologies. Adoption is key and it often slow and is difficult to measure. I argue that in today's increasingly intangible world all the barriers to economic growth are psychological.

Monday, 22 June 2015

Where's Wally QR Codes


The name of the game is find the bitcoin qr code. 

Once you find it pay some bits to it and I will fund you everything from the donation address!


The first person will to make a deposit of 0.001111 to the address they discover. This way other players will know if someone has just beat them to it. The the beauty of the open real time account.


You'll want to also private message me on G+ to remind me to check that address and make the payment to you.

Don't tell anyone else know where you found it as the game can just start again for some one else with new funds trickling in from any new donations.I will also make new games if you like it or you can post your own here.

You may need better resolution to find it.

I think if you download the pick you should at least raise the stakes and elevate the fun a bit by making a donation before you start your search.

Donations to the treasure hunt to be made to 
bitcoin:15kDHr7AL52heCapuMzYFmvdzAMQk5J5pf
which will 100% provably go to the winners!

Good luck!

Thursday, 18 June 2015

Whats up Greece? IMF?

Bitcoin has had a bit of a boost over the last couple of days and all indications lead to trouble in Greece being the main driver of this. Trispras gives "the big no" and his secretary says our world loans are "odius" and should not be repaid. Greece still owes 20 trillion Euros.

Imagine that "Sorry bank your lone was an odius rippoff, i'm not paying you" Its not going to go down well. So what is the IMF up to? Where do they get their money? their website doesn't tell you, it just serves to confuse. They certainly loan out a lot. Notice on this chart where they conveniently leave three zeros off the totals, they are in the trillions! 

So much money that they have created there own money. Its called the SDR (Special Drawing Rights). It is actually an international currency and we know so little about it. It went down in value over the last year? it goes under the ticker XDR.

Apparently wealthy countries make contributions to the IMF every year. For example in the last year New Zealand contributed 894 million SDR's to the IMF (equivalent to about the same in USD. But that's deceptive, imagine the headlines if that actually happened "NZers giving away a billion dollars a year to the IMF who waste it on bad dept to Greece!". The reality is the IMF simply credit countries this "quota", bases on GDP (not population, which is a whole other discussion) and then take it back in exchange for voting rights. Effectively meaning that if your heavily in dept you loose your voting rights as a country. The whole system is quite complicated and the international currency of the SDR is very much a mystery to most people. It makes bitcoin seem simple in comparison.

Here are the top seven loans off the most recent chart available from the IMF .



Sub Type Member Date of Arrangement Expiration Total Amount (Thousands of $) Undrawn Balance (Thousands of $)
Flexible Credit Line (FCL) Mexico January 10, 2011 January 09, 2013 29722313 29722313
Stand-By Arrangements (SBA) Greece May 09, 2010 May 08, 2013 16612681 8608422
Extended Arrangements (EFF) Ireland December 16, 2010 December 15, 2013 12233963 9083729
Flexible Credit Line (FCL) Poland, Republic of January 21, 2011 January 20, 2013 12045544 12045544




Notice that Mexico, Ireland and Poland have massive amounts still undrawn in 2013. I did some research and found this report but nothing particulaly conclusive. It all gets quite confusing. What if the all three drew on their credit at the same time, that would be 50 trillion dollars!? It is absolutely impossible for the IMF, or anyone for that matter, to have that sort of money, it's just not there.

So what does this mean? Well it's all a big dept bubble. This can only be good for bitcoin. When someone complains about not understanding bitcoin or how you can't just make something from thin air we can just say "WTF is the SDR?" 

I'll be watching the Greek crisis "Grexit" closely. It could be like Cyprus which triggered a huge bitcoin boom. Further to that the knowledge shown in the chart, that we not only have Spain and Italy to worry about but also Mexico, Ireland and Poland sitting at the top of the list It's becoming clear that there is only one way to be rid of all this mind shattering crazyness, expensive IMF orgies and diplomatic infighting. That's decentralised funds. If they keep this up maybe we'll be able to buy that house on the hill.

Sunday, 14 June 2015

NZ and Australian Banks ANZ and Westpac Start Swimming in the Crypto Pond






Ripple is making waves in the modern banking industry of Australia and New Zealand this month. The two largest banks, ANZ and Westpac are trialing methods to use Ripple for faster foreign transactions. Coindesk and Ripple labs discuss how this is happening and the benefits of the product. As a Cypto-currency writer this is great news. Ripple is however not the purest of currencies in its ideological form. It has also been troubled in recent months with litigation.


The ripple network uses similar technology to bitcoin. The system is essentially a modification of the bitcoin code. This creates a new cypto-currency with different features and the ability to change the methodology to how it is run and maintained.

One of the fundamental difference is that the ripple ledger is stored on a distributed network rather than a decentralised one. What is that? Well with bitcoin there is no controlling party and the program is run in a democratic way by the people who choose to use it. Anyone can choose to run a bitcoin server and we call this a decentralised system. Ripples operations however are controlled by Ripple Labs who distribute the program to parties of their choice. In this way they also retain control over the future of the ripple. They can change the total number of ripples to be supplied and have control over changes to the functionality of the program.

This has lead to a model where Ripple markets itself directly to banks and existing financial companies. Those companies in turn run the programs needed to keep the system operating on the web. In this case, ANZ and Westpac operate ripple servers to run their transactions. Ripple also publicly states its intention to work with banks and that it needs them to provide security and front end services, this is all over the ripple website. This has been a key in establishing its point of difference and its position as number two crypto-currency in terms of market capitalisation ($259m). It passed litecoin in late 2014 to take this spot but it it far from bitcoin which has a market cap in the billions.

Another difference is that unlike the bitcoin blockchain, which is optimised for the use of bitcoin as its token, Ripple's blockchain has been set up to allow any currency to be used across it freely. This allows easy low cost transactions in all kinds of currencies and is one of the prime reasons it's attractive to banks and payment processors.

At first glance you can see why banks want to take on ripple rather than bitcoin, but from an experianced crypto-currency perspective there are some significant issues here. Ripple is whats called an "altcoin". This advanced concept for people new to crypto-currencies is simply put, an alternative coin to bitcoin. Think of bitcoin as the US dollar and altcoins as all the other fiat currencies in the world. They are variations to bitcoin but essentially based on the same programing.

There is no limit on the creation of alternatives. There are in fact hundreds of altcoins and many have come and gone. Everything from darkcoin, made for super secret untraceable payments, to solarcoin, where your money insentivises solar power generation, or stellar, a coin based around charity. A full spectrum of moral appeal exists to go each altcoin which is in an attempt to capture a niche market.
 
The economic dynamics of altcoins is not well known beyond pump and dump type plans. They are new and small when compared with bitcoin. The possibilities of these parallel systems however are huge and certainly intricate. The point is here that banks know even less of this than your average crypto-addict. Altcoins are much more volatile and unpredictable than bitcoin. People can also easily move from one to the next and when they do it has a big impact.

Because of the nature of programmable crypto-currency having spawned from one place (bitcoin) they work very well with each other. Exchanging between bitcoin and ripple as with other altcoins is instant, free and unhindered. In this way proliferating ripple also helps proliferate bitcoin.

Ripple in particular also functions much like an auxilary to bitcoin. If you've followed the blocksize debate your mind may be pickled by now, you will however understand what a bitcoin "sidechain" is. For the vast majority however a "sidechain" is something that helps reduce the transaction traffic on the bitcoin blockchain network. It is where a sub-blockchain is linked to the bitcoin blockchain. You could say ledger within the ledger or think of it as an on and off ramp on a freeway. Ripple is a particularly dynamic sub-blockchain because a lot of information can be imbedded within each ripple. At present 50% of all ripple transactions are used in coordination with bitcoins! Many of these transaction have been used by organisations like BitStamp (a bitcoin exchange) which uses ripple to reduce its bitcoin blockchain requirements. In this way ripple and bitcoin are very interdependent and reinforce each others financial ecosystems.

Unlike bitcoin, ripples main founders are known people. these people have a large stake in ripple. In 2012 Jed McCaleb wanted to sell his 9 billion ripples when he quit. This caused a bit of drama with his colleagues who didn't want the price to dive. These large interests in the currency itself. can manipulate the market in favor of those in the know. This is where the litigation begins. Google Ventures and Apple are even an early adopters in ripple. With ripples traditional centralised structure like that of normal companies today we get the traditional power struggle going on. This may have conflicts of interest for big banks.

Whilst ripple markets itself as the banks best friend and wins them over with great efficiency. There are some intricate issues yet to be fully unveiled. There is an anti-democratic aspect and economic nature not yet fully understood or tested here.  Its good to see modern banks taking step to the crypt-currency that they once wrote off completely. It is a deep pond they are stepping into.


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