4 Important Books To Understand the Next Decades

If you find it hard to sleep at night, give a try to some heavy non-fiction reading.

Here are four important books that give us tools to make sense of where the world is going in the next decades, given that we are at a juncture where three macro trends collide:

1. the decline of the nation-state 
2. the unfolding of the current debt cycle started at the end of the second world war.
3. the digitisation of information and money, and in particular the introduction of a state-independent, inflation-proof form of money.

Here are the four books, ordered by publishing date:

The Sovereign Individual (1997, Davidson, Rees-Mogg) 

Many recent events were anticipated by the writers: the phenomenon of digital nomads, jurisdiction arbitrage through acquisition of extra residencies and passports, the rise of crypto-currencies not controlled by nation-states. And also: the reaction of nation-states to the increased power of individuals by seizing any opportunity to limit individual mobility (such as pandemics for instance), regulation overreach, the rise of anti-tech populism and the neo-Luddites, etc... The main thesis of the book is that nation-states are becoming less and less relevant with a shift of power towards individuals who turn from being captive citizens to customers of a chosen jurisdiction.

The Bitcoin Standard (2018, Saifedean Ammous) 

Dives back into history to show how hard currencies have always displaced softer ones. Denounces the excesses of the Keynes school of thought whereby inflating the money supply is seen as a 'good' thing. Explains the unique properties of Bitcoin as the first form of money with a built-in immutable monetary policy, immune from state manipulation.

Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail (2021, Ray Dalio) 

Thorough look back at history to enumerate all previous world order cycles (around 80-100 years) showing how they all display very identical patterns: crisis > rebuild > prosperity > money printing > debt > crisis. In every occurrence governments have never managed to resist the temptation to abuse their privilege to print money and inflate the money supply, eventually resulting in some form of crisis, reset, coup, revolution, civil war or world war.  

The Network State: How To Start a New Country (July 2022 , Balaji Srinivasan ) if legacy nation-states based on geographical borders are becoming less relevant, what do we build in their place? How to assemble a digital community and build a new model of democracy? And is it viable? The book is available online since July 4 and will evolve over time.

Yep, heavy reading.

Bitcoin and Energy Latest Key Figures

 

Bitcoin mining uses electricity as a security mecanism. Security means preventing past blocks from being modified so that the sequence of transactions remains written in stone. 

The difficulty to mine a block tends to increase on average with the bitcoin market capitalisation because a higher bitcoin price means more mining companies become profitable. When more miners join the collective hashing power then the code automatically increases the difficulty of the algorithm so that the pace of issuance of new blocks remains constant (1 every 10 min on average). 

It kind of makes sense that security increases with the market cap: the more gold is in the vault, the larger the walls.

Another factor influencing energy usage is the efficiency of the ASICs in terms of how many hashes can be produced per unit of energy. This tends to go down as newer equipment is rolled out.

Note that energy usage does not depend on the number of transactions processed by the network. 

So how much energy does Bitcoin mining actually use?

154750 TWh 

Total amount of energy produced around the world 

247 TWh

Energy used by Bitcoin mining 

0.16%

Share of global energy production used by Bitcoin mining 

Source: slides presented during the Bitcoin Mining Council Q1 2022 briefing. The video of the presentation is available here.

Other sources show figures with the same order of magnitude yet using different models/assumptions: 

• Coinshares Research report on Bitcoin Mining (January 2022) 
• Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (figures updated daily based on a theoretical model)

How does this compare to other countries?

 Source: Bitcoin Mining Council Q1 2022 Review slide 7

An interesting aspect of bitcoin energy consumption is that a BTC is proof that energy was spent to create it. This is in contrast to a USD or EUR, which when minted by the FED or ECB is a promise that energy will be spent in the future to redeem it. This may sound philosophical but actually has a fundamental impact of the ‘hardness’ of Bitcoin as an asset. In a context of financial crisis, people tend to favour proofs over promises.

From an environmental perspective -share of green energy in the energy mix, the Bitcoin mining industry stands out from other industries because of the natural incentives of miners to consume excess energy from hydro/solar/wind power plants. You can place a bitcoin mining container right next to a solar plant (100% green energy mix). You cannot do that with a Tesla car or a Christmas tree, whereby the energy mix coming out of the standard power socket depends on the country’s energy grid.

Takeaway from Bitcoin 2022

I got the overall feeling this year was somewhat more informative and less about sensational announcements than last year. There were many sessions taking the macroeconomic and political angle as well as an entire stage dedicated to the topic of mining. It is always fascinating to hear industry insiders talk about mining. However I was suprised to hear that home mining is making a comeback: some people know how to mine at home with minimal noise while heating up their swimming pool.

The most exciting presentation was the one Jack Mallers gave about how Strike is using the bitcoin network as payments rail for paying online and at points-of-sale. It is available here. The description he gave of the existing obsolete credit card network is EXCELLENT. You’ve got to watch it. 

Some small jurisdictions announced that they were welcoming bitcoin, making it officially ok to pay with it without generating a tax event: Prospera in Honduras and Madeira in Portugal. Operating on small territories is a smart approach: from the point of view of the country it involves little effort and it’s a zero-cost way of getting worldwide visibility and attracting investors. It also looks less daunting than the huge undertaking by El Salvador, where the government is going through the hassle of deploying its own wallet to the entire population while standing up to the IMF. Instead, why not start small and fly low. 

You have to give credit to the team organising this event for making the conference available live on Youtube on three different live streams (main stage, mining stage, open source stage) and posting each individual session just a few hours after it happened. Great job. And all this despite YouTube taking down the channel for a few hours in the middle of the event.

Some good quotes:

Michael Saylor during his firechat:

“Competition will decide. Banks that embrace it will grow, banks that reject it will shrink.”

“Not supporting bitcoin is not supporting sound money,

not supporting Lightning is like not supporting the internet.”

Ricardo Salinas about CDBCs

“Fiat religion has its high priests and this religion is not tolerant: it hates heretics.”

Jordan Peterson about central planning of money.

“one of the lovely things about cash is that it is a decentralised monetary system. It’s not that easy to track cash. Thanks God because you could be certain that if it was easy to track cash then every agency with some ethical notion would be tracking everything you’ve ever purchased trying to nudge and tap and compel you into making the decisions they regard as ethical. And it would be fine if they were right but they won’t be and so that’s a big problem.

The reason they won’t be right is because you can’t make those assumptions a priori. One of the fundamental axioms of a free market system is that the only way to properly compute the value of the emerging horizon of the future is by sampling and summing the free choice a multitude of free agents. There is no central planning way even in principle that can substitute for that.”

What is Ripple for? (Part 4 - xCurrent)

Ripple is known for XRP, yet one of their products xCurrent works independently of a token, so what does it do exactly?

Part 1 - Introduction
Part 2 - Cash Management

Part 3 - Processing transfer requests in a bank

Experiencing Consensus 2018 in New York

The last time I was in New York was in 1994. I had barely heard of the Internet at the time and it would be another year before I browse my first web page. It’s fun to be back more than 20 years later when another long term technological change is underway. New York has changed too: more Starbucks and less police sirens.

So how is it like to attend a big blockchain event? Is it full of people talking about elliptic curve mathematics and Merkle tree parsing algorithms? Not quite. A few years ago I went to Microsoft TechEd in Orlando -now called Microsoft Ignite- which is a Mecca for software developers.
Consensus draws a very different crowd than Microsoft conferences. Attendees include company founders, CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, evangelists, crypto investors, fund managers, financial analysts, students, journalists, lawyers, compliance people, tax people, consultants... Some wear suits and ties, others coloured hair and tattoos. If they have long hair they’re cryptographers.

Consensus is an event organised every year by Coindesk. This year 8500 people registered, more than twice the number Coindesk was anticipating a few months ago.
The Hilton Midtown near Broadway was packed: often it was hard to cut through the crowd in-between sessions. Next year Coindesk might have to pick a bigger place -Microsoft is known for booking Ignite in conference centers large enough to comfortably park a few A380s.

Consensus has many tracks going on in parallel so you have to keep your FOMO under control. Refrain from doing sessions back to back or it can be draining. The main presentations were happening in the Grand Ballroom: big stage, two giant screens and a sketching artist illustrating the talks live.

I met a few people who didn’t go to any of the sessions and just walked around the floors, talking to anyone and networking. Breakfast was served in the ballrooms, another opportunity for networking around bagels and muffins. In the evening the ballrooms turned into bars with free flow alcohol.

Some highlights and takeaways:

Day1

• Don Tapscott (Blockchain Research Institute) described a taxonomy of blockchain tokens. He classifies them in seven types, which is an interesting way of making sense of the 1800+ tokens that have been created to date.
  
  1. cryptocurrencies (BTC, Dash, )
  2. platforms (ETH, EOS, …)
  3. utility tokens (can be redeemed for a service, such as cloud storage for instance)
  4. security tokens (used to raise money)
  5. natural asset tokens (carbon credit, …)
  6. crypto collectibles (crypto kitties)
  7. crypto-fiat currencies, stable coins.
  
  Don Tapscott co-wrote a book titled The Blockchain Revolution.

Live sketches by Heather Klar

• John Bullard, a researcher from the Federal Reserve argued that cryptocurrencies would make economies more complicated. He suggested we might come back to a situation similar to the 1830’s when most of the notes in the US were privately printed notes (notes valid only for a particular bank).
• Some engaging presentations on Layer 2 and scalability: Amy Yin from Coinbase (@yin_ami) explained the benefits of extended keys, which allows a business to generate as many public keys as needed when getting paid by customers while maintaining a single seed. Muneeb Ali (@muneeb) highlighted the risk of forgetting about scalability issues when coding.
• What programming languages are used when writing production blockchain code? During a conversation involving Charlie Lee (founder of Litecoin) and David Schwartz (chief cryptographer at Ripple), Jutta Steiner (Parity, ex Ethereum) said “For robust implementation we went for Rust and web assembly”. 

Day 2

Hyperledger Projects

• Bridget Van Kralingen described how IBM is actively working on micro-finance with Stellar. IBM has its hands in a bunch of Hyperledger projects: food safety, traceability of diamonds, tracking of donations and carbon trading. After her talk I went to the Hyperledger booth to check out some demos: I saw one about tracing the origin of a bag of coffee you buy from the shelf all the way back to the harvest. With your iPhone you scan a QR code stuck on the package and that brings up the full history Fedex-style:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Security for institutional investors

• Ledger -the French guys behind the Nano S- were sponsoring a roundtable on the theme of crypto funds. Nicolas Bacca and Eric Larcheveque talked about a new service called Ledger Vault. The idea is to outsource the complexity of managing private keys: instead of using a bunch of Nanos you store private keys on a SHM (Secure Hardware Module) locked in bunkers in various locations. It’s easy to see how this can be useful to people who manage portfolios of cryptos. For instance the Japanese bank Nomura will use Ledger Vault to offer crypto custody services to its customers. This is a big thing. Soon more and more banks will do this.
• You now have people specialised in selling or advising on crypto funds. So who is selling crypto funds? One example is Grayscale Investments who offers 8 products. Another example is Fundstrat Global Advisors whose chief analyst Thomas Lee (@funstrat) described a model developed by his company to value cryptocurrencies. He mentioned his model was currently valuating BTC at USD36000.

Tips to Research Tokens 

• Alex Tapscott brought up the example of the 1800’s red flag act to illustrate the risk of over-regulation. To describe the position of the crypto market today: “we have reached the second half of the chess board”.

• Alex Sunnarborg from Tretras Capital gave some tips on how to research a cryptocurrency. Here is what to look at:
• transaction amount and size
• fees
• distribution of mining effort
• supply: what is circulating, what is locked in? Percentage of money held by top 100 holders?
• GitHub commits
• regulatory risks

• He added: "Short term price movements are driven by noise, not fundamentals" Yep.

Day 3

This day was more calm, everyone coming in late because of the parties from the night before.

I had conversations with people from Ripple, Dash, Ledger, Shapeshift, Interbit, Volt... then crashed into bed by 4pm.

In the end...
In the end Consensus 2018 was an exciting event that stood out by the number and diversity of its attendees.

This weird idea thrown into the public by some anonymous dude almost 10 years ago with a 9-page whitepaper and open-source code  has now infected the minds of hundreds of thousands of people from all sectors (tech, law, investment, charity, environment, tax...). They are building development platforms, interoperability protocols, secure storage systems, investment vehicles, education material... building blocks and bits and pieces that will be used as infrastructure over the next 20 years or more.

What is Ripple for? (Part3 - Processing transfer requests in a bank)

Ripple addresses the problem of international cash transfers between banks: sounds like something that should be electronic and instant, doesn't it? Well let's dig dipper and have a look at what actually happens when a client requests a transfer...

Part 1 - Introduction
Part 2 - Cash Management

What is Ripple for? (Part2 - Cash Management)

Ripple addresses the problem of international cash transfers between banks. This is part of a larger area called Cash Management. So what is cash management and why are international cash transfers so slow?

Check out Part 1 here

Image processing, NLP and blockchain visualisations with Google APIs

On Tuesday this week Data Science SG organised a meetup at Google's premises in Singapore.

Background
Google offers APIs for Machine Learning (ML APIs), which are pre-trained AI algorithms. Out of the box, ML APIs allow you for instance to categorise a sentence from a news article or distinguish between a picture of a cat and that of a turtle.

On the other end of the spectrum Google provides TensorFlow which allows you to build your neural network model from scratch: this involves tinkering with layers, biases, functions and providing your own training data.

Half-way in between is AutoML where you can train the pre-trained ML APIs using something called transfer learning. With transfer learning the first layers of the neural network model are kept while the last layers are modified and re-trained with your own data.

The three speakers were Google developer advocates. What is a "developer advocate"? Well apparently it is someone who toys around with Google APIs mostly for fun and gives demos about it, which sounds like a pretty cool job to me.

Image recognition
Markku Lepisto (@markkulepisto) showed how he trained AutoML at identifying stamps on  letters received by banks. Because he didn't have the original scans of actual customer data, he wrote a small Python program to automatically generate training data by combining images of stamps with random pages from scanned books downloaded from Project Gutenberg.

Natural Language Processing
Sara Robinson (@srobtweets) briefly described the Google Natural Language API, which is pre-trained at doing categorisation -for instance working out that a sentence from a news article talks about baseball, as well as very simple sentiment extraction -extracting entities and positive/negative sentiment from of a customer review for instance. The online tool also allows you to visualise the syntax of the sentence (grammatical breakdown).

Then Sara asked: how would you go about building a model using your own custom categories?

She showed how to do it using TensorFlow which comes with Python and C++ interfaces. Some of the APIs are low-level (construct the model layer by layer), others are wrappers such as Keras.
For training data, Google BigQuery has large datasets ready to be used such as a list of StackOverflow questions along with their tags (C#, SQL, Javascript, ...).

Bitcoin and Ethereum visualisations with BigQuery
The last part of the evening was left to Allen day (@allenday) in front of a hungry audience.
Allen decided to use BigQuery to analyse transaction data from the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains.
BigQuery synchronises with the Bitcoin ledger every 10min, which is good enough to have a near real-time view of the Bitcoin blockchain.

Allen used Gephi to develop interesting visualisations showing the movement of funds between wallets... More details here.

This a Google Easter Bunny

What is Ripple used for? (Part 1)

This is the first of a series of videos about Ripple and its applications.

1 - The main Ripple products
2 - What is Cash Management?
3 - What happen behind the scenes?
4 - Use of XCurrent
5 - Use of XRapid

Tools to Trade Cryptocurrency from Singapore

iPhone wallets

• Bread Nice and simple, supports BTC only.
• Jaxx Supports a large list of cryptocurrencies. Supports import from BTC paper wallets, even those that are BIP-38 encrypted.

Buy and sell crypto from/to SGD

• Coinhako
• Coinbase
• FYB-SG

Both Coinhako and Coinbase work in Singapore with xfers, which is a payment gateway located in Asia. You can transfer SGD to xfers from a local Singapore bank account (DBS or HSBC for instance). At the time of writing (December 2017), xfers is going through maintenance issues.

FYB-SG allows only purchase of BTC. You can fund FYB-SG with a local bank transfer in SGD. Prices on FYB-SG are often higer than coinhako.

View the balance of wallets

• Bitcoin: Bitcoin Block Explorer
• Ethereum: Etherscan.io

Buy crypto not listed on exchanges

• Shapeshift: allows you to swap a crypto currency for another.

Store crypto safely

Hardware wallets

• Trezor: supports BTC, BCH, BTG, DASH, LTC, ZCASH, ETH, ETC
• Ledger Nano: supports many more (XRP,...)

Paper wallets

• Bitcoin: https://www.bitaddress.org
• Supports encryption of paper wallets (password protected with BIP38)
• Decrypt a private key previously encrypted with a password and display various formats (can be useful when using Electrum for instance) 
• Ethereum: https://www.myetherwallet.com

Extract crypto from paper wallets

• iOS: Jaxx (supports BTC, Bitcoin Cash and ETH). This is the easiest way because it allows you to simply scan the private key with your phone and it prompts you for a password if you used BIP38 encryption. 
• MacOS: Electrum (supports BTC and Bitcoin Cash)

Safely store paper wallets

• Rent a safety box from your bank (DBS, HSBC for premium customers only)
• Rent a safety box from Certis Cisco