Digital Elections - The Crypto King and Queen

The last week of political debates in the UK where I night mare for a spectator. There is no surprise if you express concern to your neighbor about the fact that there is no one good to vote for, everyone feels the same. Its been like this for years but now its seems we are used to it and it's only getting worse.

The representatives have no sincerity and no real desire for problem solving. It seems all their positions are simply angling to buy votes from the general public. Its a disgrace. They read prepared line and take themselves so seriously. They couldn't listen to the population if they tried, they'd be thinking about making sure they looked as though they where listening as you spoke. They posture for strength and sensibility and Its clear all just a charade. I think even the teenage first time voters can see this. Look into there eyes it all blank their minds pickle from lives in the sick twisted politics arena. I can't hardly watch the stuff.

The New Zealand Election last year was much the same. it however had a new dash of excitement with Kim Dot com vying to turn his digital fame into political power  in an attempt to save himself from the prying arms of the FBI and to uplift the people with his modern ideology and slick we pages. And it was exciting, the media went mad.Kim went made. At Kim's rallies, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange cryticised the prime minister and the NZ government.Kim Dot com broke up with his wife, his house servants turned against him, and He cried on national TV. All before the election. then when he lost Dave Tamahere, the honorable Maori Mana party rebel rat bag didn't get the seat which everyone thought he was born for.

Hopefully we will get a spanner in the works in the UK, it would make good tv. but some how I think this place is a bit to big for that kind of impact. This year at least, however It does seem like a growing trend.i Certainly consider Julian Assange a more credible leader than any other public figure. I guess I'd donate to him on a yearly basis at the level he said was needed.

Certainly I'd rather do that than give the current government more money for policies like, giving teenagers cheap loans to help them move out of home!! I mean you don't have to think about that one long to figure out it bad on so many levels. I was 20 once i know what i would do with the extra cash, and I don't think the land lords really deserve any more government money available so they can raise there bond requirements. Total vote buying. Its a kind of democratic inversion.

internationally though we do have a new kind of leader emerging. Movie stars, musicians and big businessmen seem to have a greater part to play in the world. Names like Arnold Swartzenager, Richard branson, Bill gates. Edward Snowden, Bono, Joe Armstrong, Tom Gable, Lorde!? Could it be George and Amal Clooney, Brad and Angelina?

Russel Brand is even telling us not to vote. He fells the same about these pointless elections. Will they ever change? Our lives are no longer confined to one country. We have an international economy and now we have international currency with Bitcoin. Why not international elections? A Bitcoin president. Rubs against some of the anarchist tendencies of some underground crypto supporters, but maybe they'd change their minds if Henry Rollins could get a seat. i think a voluntary Bitcoin election could be a good thing. especially in light of the splitting of the Bitcoin foundation recently. Even if its influence was minimal at first it would certainly make a great marketing campaign.   

Could it be Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. Could it be Russel Brand? or is it that girl who does the bitcoin youtube videos? Either way would be much keener to participate in a Crypto Election than to the circus that we have now.

I say we make a new election for someone who we really like.

Mt Gox Silk Road Fiasco Extraordinaire

When you read the all news about Mt Gox today, scenes from The Blacklist and Breaking bad come to mind. As Redington might say the plot is "truly unfathomable and what happens next is anyone's guess". I have been watching the bankruptcy of Mt Gox closely. They have a good amount of my money so I have read every court order carefully and have a good understanding of the development of the company. The story sounds more like fiction than fact.

Mark Karples, a sweaty manga cartoon loving geek living with his parents in Japan buys Mt Gox off a friend and turns what was once a magic card web site it into a the worlds biggest Bitcoin exchange. Within a few years the company is making millions in profits and overseas close to a billion dollars in capitol. Mark has 20 employees and hammocks in the office and they even starts a Bitcoin cafe on the ground floor of the head office in Tokyo. Its a place of crazy money, computer games and Linux  The companies activities spread all over the world.

Another Bitcoin organisation was growing during the same period, but on the dark web and this is called the Silkroad. On this website anyone can buy anything especially if its illicit and the main currency used is Bitcoin. Inevitably the drug lords who made fortunes on SR platform have to use Mt Gox in order to exchange their funds for fiat money. The two organisations grow in parallel,  however Mark Karples claims that Mt Gox was never liked by the Silk Road Community.

Trading bots on Mt Gox earned the company extra cash and the price of Bitcoin went through the roof from less than 10 US cents when Mt Gox first started to over $1000 USD. Mark offered to help the US government with fraud investigations. they would provide suspected fake passport applicants and details of suspicious activities to the FBI. This is ongoing Mark builds up a relationship with two Agents Carl Ford and Shaun Bridges. At the time he becomes a suspect and primary lead in the governments hunt for Silk road

Mt Gox's liquidity comes under question by the online community. In order to prove the assets of the company Mark makes a transfer 424,242 Bitcoins between accounts in one public transaction. It is a tribute to Monty Pythons Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and proves that Mt Gox has at least $500 million in liquid assets at the time.
 
Silk Road is busted by joint FBI DEA operation. Though Bitcoin was used by Silkroad patrons for its perceived anonymity it turns out that through the course of the trail officials manage collect allot of funds from various people involved due to the traceable public ledger. The judge praises the bitcoin block chain for allowing this. The head villain "Dread Pirate Roberts" or Ross Ulbricht is detained and put on trial with many of his accomplices and Silk Road users. It is the biggest international drug bust ever and the US government collects all the funds.

At the the time of the Silk Road bust, Mt Gox is also put under FBI investigation by Shaun Bridges  

They have to freeze large parts of their business and all their bank accounts. In addition Mt Gox begins to experience a "bank run" and has liquidity issues and collapses. Its Bitcoin price dropped through the floor before the collapse. It's a disaster of unmatched proportions for the digital currency world.

Mt Gox's bankruptcy proceeding drags on. Mark Karples claiming hundreds of millions in looses due to theft through hackers using the Bitcoin malleability weakness. Bankruptcy claims by the public are still (to this day) not being accepted until the results of a proper investigations are complete. 200,000 bitcoins are found on a forgotten hard drive. In total there hundreds of millions in dollars and Bitcoin's sitting in the Mt Gox accounts and finding the reported theft as this money could potentially repay many of Mt Gox's dept. It's all become pretty hefty for a company named after some fantasy card thing. Mark Karples is publically shamed and has been removed from bankrupts process by the lawyer. He is very silent on the matters and hides from the public eye.

In January 2015 Newspapers announce that they believe that missing Bitcoins from Mt Gox where stolen by someone rather than hacked as Mark had claimed

"Tokyo's Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) told The Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper on Thursday that no more than around 7,000 of the roughly 650,000 Bitcoins that vanished from Mt Gox could be attributed to cyber-attacks. " 

This news found at here went little noticed until the recent revelations of two government officials.

The latest DEA and FBI confessions shine a whole new light on this bazaar plot.

This news has come up through the Silk Road trail and the unsealing of this official document. The entire trial in contention. Two primary officials involved in investigations of Silk Road are accused of theft and extortion of millions of dollars from Silk Road, Mt Gox and other Bitcoin exchanges. It is an under cover investigation saga that quickly became twisted and out of control. 

DEA agent Carl Force and Secret Service Special Agent Shaun Bridges infiltrated into the illusive Silkroad through an inside informant Curtis Green, a 47 year old normal guy who didn't do drugs and worked for SR as a customer service rep. Carl Force first met Curtis when they busted him with a Kilo of cocaine in his letterbox. quite out of character but, he cooperated and opened up his logins for FBI use. Curtis's pseudonym was "flush" and worked with Carl who became "Nob" amongst others. At first they worked for DPR (Ross Ulbricht) doing admin for the Silk Road web site. All this information is logged by the investigation.

After some ongoing dramas and thefts, Ross Ulbrich noticed someone had stolen $350k from Silkroad petty cash using the "Slush" login. Dread Pirate Roberts got angry and after some online discussion ordered a hit to "terminate" Curtis. This was to be carried out by "Nob" (Carl Force) who has also become a hit man on the Silk road site. So Carl and Shaun faked the murder of Curtis, made proof of death photos, collected payment for themselves, let Curtis free and continued to infiltrate Silk Road.

Shaun and Carl continued on a takeover. Mt Gox provided information and were extorted for services, Carl Force became a Bitcoin Compliance Consultant on the side and acquired shares in rival exchanges whilst manipulating the market through regulatory powers. With so much Bitcoin on their hands, the two agents had to coax various Bitcoin and payments companies to help convert their ill-gotten gains into dollars. Mark Karples refused to do a laundering deal with Carl Force and that week gets a subpena for his US operation from Shaun Bridges. Carl Forced even tipped off Dread Pirate Roberts on the FBI Silk Road investigation. Shaun and Carl's corruption continues until eventually Silk Road gets busted. Shortly after they leave government service at the DEA and FBI.

So Ulbrich goes to trial in 2014 and accuses Mark Karples of being the real mastermind of Silk road.  It becomes evident that the former agents Carl and Shaun had been corrupt and they are put under investigated by the government for serious fraud and misconduct. A huge amount of evidence is withheld from the trial because it would hinder ongoing investigations of the government. The Department of Justice are now charging Shaun Bridges and Carl Force with fraud and it is expected that number will be in the millions.

So there it is in a nut shell (also see the Forbes article). You can't help to wonder if there is an illusive Redington or Berlin out there with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Mt Gox funds. The results from the  new trial will be very telling. Could Mark Karples be Heisenberg? are the 650,000 Bitcoins the Japanese police looking for possibly with the FBI? Ether way someone should make a manga cartoon on it, it is insane!

Mark Karple in his early Nija formations, just before he said "no way" to an FBI summons

SQL Skeletons!

Maybe they should have been QE3 skeletons? To many ideas! Any how this one came first

Authentic Medicine

As you hear all the time, there are many ways that blockchain technology can be used.  Here's how I think a system for insuring authenticity could work. It requires a lot less administration than current systems and integrates a low maintenance international loyalty system. In places life Africa where medicine is often stolen and or tampered with it could make a big difference.

It might be possible to even integrate a gps log into the qr code. This could offer further useful information and help fight crime. Private keys could even be inside the package, kind of like a cereal token in your pills. There are heaps of possibilities there. By empowering the customer to use their qr scanning phones we can make it do the verification for us and everyone wins. Coin prism gives you your own crypto token. We just need to do a little programming and make some stickers.

Bitcoin Fly

AI Trading Starts - Bitcoin Can Save us from the Terminator

In December Stephen Hawkins said that "the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race" What a crack pot! you might say. But hang on a second. This is the same guy who we have collectively made the authority on the structure of the universe! In this day it is disturbing how many people don't know about the concept of the AI singularity. Its sad to say I find jokes on the subject tend to"flop" quite "tera'bly.

So last week when a company like Bridgewater announced that it will be switching on its new AI algorithm Trading system you feel like you need to publish something. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-27/bridgewater-is-said-to-start-artificial-intelligence-team

The statement about 'Learning' is the key to it and what the compute learns who knows, but we better start taking notes. Already computers trading programmed algorithms perform hugely better than our professional traders on the stock market and it was a long time ago that Watson beat our best player at a game of chess. These systems however didn't actually learn much if anything, they were pre-programmed with a lot of information to apply to the situations. 

Recently a study was performed on an AI computer teaching itself how to play a range of Atari video games. the computer proved its self to better than a human on the majority of games. For some reason humans are better at Pacman, but that's about it. the thing that's different in this case is that the computer was only given three basic parameters. Pixle recognition, learning ability and the concept that achieving a high score was the objective.  At first the computer flunked out, as you do, but after around 2 hours of play it was performing better than a well practiced human.

So you better get out of trading Whats scary is what can happen when the learning computers get self aware and go into survival mode. Its a bit of a jump, and we will skip any discussion on how that might happen in detail. I don't know I'm not an expert on this, but for the purpose of this blog lets just say its like Skynet in the Terminator. I'm sure in reality it would be much more subtle.

Computer processing power in the world is increasing at an exponential rate. This is driven by science and for government and security (including bitcoin cryptography). The chips are actually being engineered by computers and this intensifies the AI singularity thing. To list some of the fastest computer systems in the world we have Taine-2, a super computer in China (33 petaflops), IBM Sequoia in the USA (17 petaflops) and BOINC, an open international science network (20 petaflops). What the hell is petaflop? basic rull is divide by 4 and it gives you your equivalent GHz, like your computer has at home. So Taine the 2nd is at 8,250,000 Ghz. Thats pretty fast! I'm only rocking 3.5 but what about the Bitcoin network? as of today is is clocking 350Peta hashes which is the equivalent of a ridiculous number 17,780,000,000Ghz Seventeen Billion Gigahertz. Thats more than a thousand times faster than the fastest super computer.

So what does this mean? Bitcoin has achieved something that has not been possible before. All the scientist in the world and BOINC'ing around trying to create the most powerful computer network for years. Including Stephen Hawkins and NASA and the rest. Then this happens. I just want to be able to play clash of the clans and play with bitcoins! Has it gone to far?

The reality is that Bitcoin network is designed for encryption, decryption and verifying transactions. There's no chance that it will become self aware itself, it doesn't really have the right processors for that and it doesn't learn. There is also little possibility humans diverting the power because it would involve mass coordination would involve forfeiting financial gains. Surely however this giant network has a place in the phenomenon.

I'm sure AI trading computers are going to love Bitcoin. So that one thing, but I don't want to write about that. Lets get back to the Skynet situation. Its seems like Bitcoin could be a force of potential evil here. Skynet might be able to hack all computers and get hold of the Bitcoin network. They could then probably use the decryption power to hack into the Pentagon. It just so happens that Bitcoin miners are some of the most secure computers around for the simple reason that they physically have money on them. So this type of thing would be quite hard even for a hyper intelligent Skynet. The problem would be though that bit coin miners would quickly notice could literally pull the plug on the mining machines.

If you have seen the movie "The Imitation Game" recently you might have discovered that cryptography is very important during war. The movie is about Alan Turing, the inventor of the computer, and how he cracked the enigma code. His computer saved us from a lot of evil in that situation.

It didn't even have one Ghz of power but it was the fastest computer in the world at the time. The Bitcoin network is the same and it is fundamentally controlled by humans. Miners are not going to stop what they are doing as long as they are making money, unless of course it was an AI apocalypses and terminator is walking down the street! It's a pretty good incentive to divert your computer power.

Its a knife edge but I think that humans value life more than money and power. That's why Bitcoin and its decentralized and heavily monitored super computer can save us from the Terminator. But don't listen to me listen to Stephen Hawkins!

Bitcoin dontations are appreciated. I'm not rich. 13ticQ1HhPDq2XECHEyxjYgy3wsehRjhwd

Imitation Banks (Loan Sharks)

Arriving in the UK on the latest adventure I was shocked at how inefficiently the banking system seems. Me and my partner had been told it was a nightmare trying to set up a bank account. We got a recommendation from some experienced strugglers to go to Loyds. Turns out this recommendation a bit rough and the experience is worth documenting. I wish I had had a tape recorder.

On entering the bank there is a line on the carpet and a sign that says please wait to be served. So we stand there and look on in dismay with some others at two empty work stations in front of us. A staffer on the trot lets us know;

"There's nobody at that counter you'll have to get in line for the tellers and get served there."

I'm thinking seriously, I can see that! At the front of the next cue we are greeted by helpful experienced teller with a laminated account card. She asks;

"How long have you been in the country?"

“Just a couple of weeks we are moving here for at least two years”

"Do you have proof of address?"

“We have these letters from the national health service”

"Have you got ID on you?" 

“Yes we do”

"We can give you an account now but it won't be a very good one, I suggest you go online and set the account up that way."

"What do you mean by not a very good account?"

"Well an account with credit facilities and a better fee structure"

"We don't really need credit at this stage

"It’s still better if you apply online"

She was nice and somehow we walked out of the building reasonably happy and without an account. A FAIL! My partner and I decided to try another branch and I insist on being a bit more forward the next round.

We walk into a bank and I say plainly in very much the Queens English

"We would like to open bank accounts"

to which the front desk man's response is

"Pardon"

Maybe It’s like he's a coke dealer and he thinks I'm a cop? His superior was standing next to him and there was nobody else in the foyer. Six or seven other bankers had been standing quite some meters away on the carpet to the left of the front counter and had since, maybe at the sight of me and my partner, peeled of to their respective offices. I repeated my statement without rolling my eyes.

"Do you have an appointment"

"No sorry we don't"

"Well you need an appointment to do that"

"We are happy to wait for a time that you are free, do you have anything today"

they looked

"There is no one available today"

“Can we book another day then?”

"You need to do that online"

"What if i'm a little old lady who doesn't use the internet"

"Then you could book a time through the phone"

"But you have a computer here, can we find an open slot together now, it's a lot better for us as we don’t have easy access to these things"

they both have a look on screen and fumble around a bit

"We are busy, the computer only goes to certain. . ."

He can see I’m frustrated now as we both just saw the seven people having a good old watercooler party.

"Can you at least tell us what we will need so that we can avoid coming in without the correct documents"

"Do you have jobs?"

"Yes"

"How long have you been in the country?"

"We just arrived"

"We can't give a bank account to you unless you've been in the country for two years"

at this stage I have both hands down on the counter 

"I have quite a few pounds in my pocket that I don't want to carry around with me, surely we can do something?"

"You'll have to try somewhere else"

He replies in a pressing tone.

I was given completely different reasons as to why they would or wouldn't give us accounts. It's crazy to think of trusting an organisation like that. In a world with 199 trillion dollars of global dept you'd think a little bit of cash might be appreciated.

Any street hack could simply stand outside with an iPad and set customers up with fully functional Bitcoin "bank accounts" on the spot. Arranged a pay conversion service like Bitpay and an exchange with that provides debit cards, say ANX and really that's all you need day to day. You can spend your bits anywhere mastercard is accepted, works internationally with no fees if you deposit 1 Bitcoin on your debit card. Sounds a lot better that being talked down to by stuck up bankers. I can't wait to see homeless guys setting people up with Bitcoin wallets at the front door of Loyds. It would be such poetic justice.

Unfortunately we need a normal bank account to pay our landlord at this stage. So next we went to HSBC, who are getting heat in the media for eliciting tax evasion. They kindly set us up almost straight away, lots of questions, funny colloquial business and not much proof of anything. We had two passports and a letter from an employer stating employment but not specifying pay and guess what. . they gave us 7000 pounds worth of credit.which we didn't ask for.

The word "bank" implies that they hold something for you, but they don’t. They don’t want to hold your cash. Its so ingrained in us that even I'm shocked when they behave in accordance with this. All they do is dispense dept. We should call them loan sharks.

Unfortunately loan hungry banks are much more threatening than Minecraft sharks. The banks are not like our youthful impressions, not like the Minecraft bank, they are much less charming. The truth is the banks are not banks at all, they are only imitating.