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Author: Geoff Ebbs

  • Blockchain Technology Explained

    Blockchain Technology Explained

    Author: Alan T. Norman

    ISBN: no ISBN

    Publisher: self-published, Alan T. Norman

    Published in December 2017, Alan T. Norman’s latest book on the technology goes a lot deeper than many of these introductory texts. At 126 pages it simply has more depth and because Norman has written separate books on investing in digital currency and other areas of software development he has a deeper body of work on which to draw.

    As one example of that depth, he actually goes into detail on the specific problems faced by organising financial services online, which BitCoin solves and the technical aspects of that solution. Put simply, the double spend problem is ensuring that money is only spent once and the solution is to combine the power of file sharing technology to ensure that information is widely distributed and always available with encryption to ensure that the distributed information is secure and accurate.

    He builds that picture piece by piece using simple business english, with enough examples that most readers will get the picture, without being buried in technical detail.

    He moves through the blockchain, BitCoin, other digital currencies and their uses and applications, distributed apps and the application of all this technology in corporations, software development and governance.

    He breaks down the hype around the blockchain and distributed apps to paint a realistic picture of its implementation and how it will roll out in our everyday life.

    Norman also goes into sufficient detail about the operation of the technology to explain why it is secure and how it works. These explanations are readable and straightforward without being dumbed down and over-simplistic.

    For example his explanation about the use of cryptography in the blockchain is titled A Deep Dive on How Blockchain Hashing Works

    He opens the chapter with the observation,

    “This chapter is here by popular demand from reader comments. It’s a deep dive into how hashing works. This is going to get very technical, and you don’t have to read this section in order to understand the basics of blockchain.”

    He then launches into a good, high level explanation of the idea of hashing (creating a code that proves online data has not been tampered with) and then, in the next section, how it is used in the blockchain. Once he has explained it as simply as possible he observes,

    “I’ve been defining mining difficulty by the number of leading zeroes a successful hash needs to have, since it’s an easy visual way to understand mining difficulty. The truth is more complicated and variable.”

    In this way, he builds up a complex understanding at the depth required by the reader. As soon as you get bored with the level of detail provided you jump to the next heading. By the end of that particular chapter, he has explained the SHA-256 hashing algorithm in sufficient detail that you could actually map it out and write the code required to perform it. Most readers will skip over some part of it, but it is great to be able to delve into it at your level of interest.

    His discussion of the limitations of BitCoin as an active currency is honest and important. With gateway providers, such as Stripe, dropping support for BitCoin it is imperative that people considering the business applications of these technologies understand the thinking behind it. In a nutshell, that limitation is the time it takes to authorise a transaction on the blockchain. At many minutes that authorisation time is well outside the instant payment systems that we have become used to online rendering Bitcoin on its own useless as a medium for transaction in most ecommerce applications.

    Norman outlines some of the approaches that are being taken to develop solutions to these teething problems but points out that the technology is not ready to sweep the world in quite the way that some of the marketing hype (and some of the less considered books available) suggest.

    In summary, this is a nice combination of a low priced, self-published book and a reasonable depth of information. At the time of writing it was $US1.02 for the Kindle edition and $US9.95 for the paperback. That being said, the book is not as well produced as those from more established publishers. The ability to navigate through the book is limited to the basic functions of the Kindle application on which you are reading it. The layout is basic, there are no footnotes or references in the text and the presentation of headings and lists is primitive.

    These are small sacrifices for the price saving if that matters to you.

  • Blockchain: The Beginners Guide

    Blockchain: The Beginners Guide

    Author: Artemis Caro

    ISBN: 1985574020

    Publisher: self-published, Artemis Caro

    The full title of Artemis Caro’s recent book (February 2018) is Blockchain: The Beginners Guide To Understanding The Technology Behind Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency (The Future of Money). It is a quick overview and introduction aimed to provide introduce the interested reader to the overall concepts. It is cheap, $US3.10 on the Kindle and $US5.49 for the paperback and Kindle combined at the time of going to press. It is short and does not have a lot of depth. That said, it covers the basic questions in an organised fashion and gives you some pointers into what areas you might want to explore further. It sets out to cover the questions:

    • A Brief History of Blockchain Technology
    • Blockchain Basics: Managing Digital Transactions
    • What is a Distributed Ledger?
    • Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin
    • Implications Of Blockchain: Big Data, Privacy & Personal Data
    • Profiting from Blockchain Technologies
    • Limitations & Challenges of Blockchain
    • The Future of Blockchain

    The marketing blurb says “The goal of this book is not to plumb the depths of the mathematical wizardry used to code blockchain-based applications, but rather to serve as an introduction to the broader architecture and conceptual background behind blockchain technology.” That is something of an understatement.

    If you want a quick read to bring you up to speed this is not a bad way to get an overview fast. If you like doing your own research, though, a weekend on the Internet would probably give you more satisfaction.

  • Blockchain: Starting Guide for beginners

    Blockchain: Starting Guide for beginners

    Author: Brian Reel

    ISBN: 1983889105

    Publisher: self-published, Brian Reel

    BLOCKCHAIN: Starting Guide For Beginners, All About Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies, Mining And Future Of Money was self published by Brian Reel in January 2018 and provides a high level overview in straightforward business English.

    Reel takes us through the actual processes of creating, using and trading in BitCoin as well as different ways of using the blockchain on which BitCoin is built. Each topic is dealt with in a practical way. The chapter on mining bitcoins, for example, discusses the method by which the block chain is stored and promulgated and how that is applied in the creation of new BitCoins (mining) and how companies are engaging in that mining exercise.

    The information is general, providing information for the educated layperson, rather than providing technical information or specific methods for engaging in these activities. Like many of the introductory texts, especially those self published, the book is short and snappy, skipping across the surface of these complex topics.

    For those who want to get an overview of the landscape quickly, this is probably ideal. Those who prefer to take more control of their research, though, a weekend on your favourite search engine may produce more useful (and current) results.

    You can buy the ebook for $US0.99 by clicking here.

  • Getting ahead of Bitcoin

    Getting ahead of Bitcoin

    Whether you are an investor, a programmer or an entrepreneur BitCoin will radically and directly change your life in the next couple of years.

    School teachers, activists and artists might not be directly in the firing line but Bitcoin’s underlying technology, the blockchain, is going to affect us all. The questions are how and how fast.

    This article answers your basic questions about the blockchain and tells you where to go for more in-depth information

    What is this thing called Blockchain?

    If you doubt the radical changes that technology has wrought on society in the last three decades, just watch the queue for wifi at the Guangzhou Airport. We are so addicted to the Internet it is the first thing we organise when we get to our accommodation on a weekend away, move house, or plan where we will spend the day working “out of the office”.

    The Blockchain is the next layer of the network that already connects us and enables our communal activity.

    The telecommunications network allowed us to speak to each other, leave messages and then, by 1964, send electronic signals and printed documents. The microchip allowed us to use personal productivity software to do things that had previously required volumes of pen and paper. The combination of the two allows us to maintain our diary, perform our banking, watch movies, take photographs and share all of that activity with loved ones, friends and colleagues over a hand held device. Most of us now see the smart phone and our connection to the network as an essential accessory in our daily life.

    Now, that networked computer has been empowered by the addition of a public record of all the transactions we perform. That public record is called the blockchain and it provides an accurate, immutable history of relevant online activity that will change the nature of trust. That reliable and permanent record of all transactions will rapidly replace the public record, institutions and governance in ways that we can only begin to imagine. It will be applied to supply chain logistics, as well as all transactions where a chain of custody, provenance or proof of ownership is importance.

    Think about it.

    We currently keep our money in a bank because we trust the bank to keep it safe. As that money has become completely virtual, we connect to the bank simply to record our transactions so that we can check our balance and make spending decisions based on accurate, up-to-date information. Now that the network itself has an accurate, up-to-date record of all our transactions and our account balance, the role of the bank is significantly reduced.

    And that is just the role of the BitCoin. Imagine the same technology applied to documents that record ownership. Every online photograph can be registered and every use of it tracked using the blockchain. Lab results, works of art, any object worth protecting can be protected by the blockchain. A complete chain of custody, provenance, or transaction history can be recorded automatically as an object moves through different hands.

    This can be applied to the storage of personal health records, the maintenance history of a car, the tagging of electrical appliances, viewing of online files.

    This transition will take some time, just as the smartcard has taken some time to replace cash. When we think about the transition from credit cards, through eftpos to smartcards and cashless transactions and then the current wave of cardless transactions we can see that these revolutions have long lead times and then very rapid implementations once the technology reaches a critical mass. Each wave of that transition had its own impact on the businesses involved and the impact over the last two decades has been remarkable.

    We are now reaching the point where BitCoin has moved out of the experimental and speculative phase into mainstream investing and blockchain applications are being implemented in organisations worldwide and the technology is being built into mainstream operating systems and development environments.

    What do you need to know?

    RIght now the world of virtual currency is exploding. Initial coin offerings (ICOs) are disrupting the financial landscape and entrepreneurs are exploring a brave new world of distributed applications to facilitate business models that were considered fanciful half a decade ago.

    The adventures of BitCoin have been well publicised – if not well explained – and most of us understand that something big is afoot, but we are not sure exactly what.

    The good news is the basic technologies are now well established and understood and a second generation of books explaining it all has emerged. Luckily, these books are targeted at specific audiences: Entrepreneurs, corporate managers, programmers, academics and investors. There are quick-to-read books that cost little and explain things simply as well as in-depth books to help you to make strategic decisions or, at least, decide strategically where to focus your further investigations. The

    This article introduces you to the cream of the crop. We have deliberately selected books available both physically and as ebooks. We have provided links to Amazon so that you can load them directly into your Kindle at a couple of clicks, but given you the details needed to shop around and get them in your preferred format, from your preferred provider as fast as possible.

    Conclusion

    Some people prefer to do their own research, others to get information packaged in a dense and digestible package, tailored to their needs. The introductory texts discussed here provide a quick introduction in such a manner, though the very short ones do not provide much more depth than a weekend session with Dr Google.

    If you are after an introduction to Blockchain, rather than simply BitCoin, Alan T Norman’s Blockchain Explained is my value-for-money recommendation. You can buy the Kindle edition directly for $US3.14 by clicking here. It is too detailed for some readers, though. Shorter books include Brian Reel’s BlockChain: Starting Guide for Beginner’s and Artemis Caro’s BlockChain: The Beginner’s Guide

    As you would expect, the three O’Reilly publications are more serious works at a more serious price. Each text has a specific audience:

    Blockchain: Blueprint for a new economy is the theoretical high level text aimed at strategic thinkers, Mastering BitCoin is the technical text aimed at tech savvy readers interested in financial applications and Decentralised Applications is aimed directly at programmers in the distributed application space.


     

  • Brexit was the practice run for Trump

    Brexit was the practice run for Trump

    … and Trump is the practice run for taking over the US establishment.

    As reported here a little over a year ago, Robert Mercer has been building a media empire specifically designed to consolidate power.

    His empire was initially built on his work in artificial intelligence and natural languages that brought him in contact with the establishment through the campaign for the hearts and minds in Afghanistan. He then multiplied those earnings by building software that predicted share prices based on the behaviour of investors rather than the value of the investments. That investment engine generated the cash to begin building a media empire that could then use all the techniques developed over the years to exponentially amplify the power of those media holdings. The current UK investigation shows how that media empire and software tools were used to manipulate Brexit and the Trump election.

    Who knows what he plans to do know that he has got a President in his pocket and the attention of the industrial military complex but one can be sure he has moved to a seat at the “big table”. That is the one per crore, the seven hundred people who make the big decisions that affect the rest of us.

    For more information about the seven hundred, see the founding document or the initial analysis of how to identify the One Per Core.

    The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked 
    Logo for the #OnePerCrore
    Who is the One per Crore. 700 people control almost half the wealth in the world. Who are they?

    A motivated US billionaire – Mercer and his chief ideologue, Bannon – helped to bring about the biggest constitutional change to Britain in a century. There are three strands to this story. How the foundations of an authoritarian surveillance state are being laid in the US. How British democracy was subverted through a covert, far-reaching plan of coordination enabled by a US billionaire. And how we are in the midst of a massive land grab for power by billionaires via our data. Data which is being silently amassed, harvested and stored. Whoever owns this data owns the future.

    To anyone concerned about surveillance, Palantir is practically now a trigger word. The data-mining firm has contracts with governments all over the world – including GCHQ and the NSA. It’s owned by Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and major investor in Facebook, who became Silicon Valley’s first vocal supporter of Trump.
    Facebook was the source of the psychological insights that enabled Cambridge Analytica to target individuals. It was also the mechanism that enabled them to be delivered on a large scale.

     

    The company also (perfectly legally) bought consumer datasets – on everything from magazine subscriptions to airline travel – and uniquely it appended these with the psych data to voter files. It matched all this information to people’s addresses, their phone numbers and often their email addresses. “The goal is to capture every single aspect of every voter’s information environment, and with the personality data enabled Cambridge Analytica to craft individual messages.”
  • Warming poles drive wild weather

    Warming poles drive wild weather

    The “Beast from the East” that froze Europe last week is actually closer to the Game of Thrones Winter crossing The Wall. The Wall is a jet-stream driven by the temperature difference between the poles and continental Eurasia and North America. As the Arctic warms dramatically that differential disappears and the arctic airmass leaks south. The Vortex that froze northern USA in 2014 in a way that shocked the public at the time, has returned intermittently since and has now hit Northern Europe as well.
    This is the atmospheric equivalent of the Gulf Stream that controls the weather in the North Atlantic, carrying warm tropical water up the East Coast of America to the West Coast of England. It is the Gulf Stream that keeps Eastern USA, England and Ireland comparitavely warm. The Ice Ages of pre-history occurred when the gulf stream was turned off.
    Following a discussion about the impact of the gulf stream on ocean currents in live science discussions about whether global warming could cause an ice age fuelled hilarity among client skeptics. The notion was at the heart of the 2004 movie, The Day After Tomorrow. It took five years of more considered discussion for this simplistic notion that the planet will fix itself by simply flipping its major settings to engender a more nuanced discussion. Looking back over more than a decade of reporting on the politics of climate change what appears more important than our oversimplification of science in an attempt to get simple and clear explanations is the tendency to see these solutions as saving humanity. Rather than confronting the very real difficulties of the small changes in front of us, we immediately look to the more distant future in an attempt to find grand solutions.
    How Climate Change Interacts With the Polar Vortex
    The entire region of the Arctic above the 80 degree North Latitude line has been 8.64 degrees Celsius warmer than normal for all of 2018 thus far. This is an extraordinary departure for a region that plays a critical role in how the Earth’s climate system functions. When the Jet Stream winds slow, they tend to meander — forming large ridges and deep troughs. The elongated ridges and troughs eventually break like waves — pushing against the circulation of the Polar Vortex.
    Scientists alarmed by ‘crazy’ temperature rises
    Record warmth in the Arctic is unprecedented. The north pole gets no sunlight until March, but an influx of warm air has pushed temperatures in Siberia up by as much as 35C above historical averages this month. Greenland has already experienced 61 hours above freezing in 2018 – more than three times as many hours as in any previous year. The question now is whether this signals a weakening or collapse of the polar vortex, the circle of strong winds that keep the Arctic cold by deflecting other air masses. The vortex depends on the temperature difference between the Arctic and mid-latitudes, but that gap is shrinking because the pole is warming faster than anywhere on Earth. While average temperatures have increased by about 1C, the warming at the pole – closer to 3C – is melting the ice mass.
    New study sharpens focus on Antarctic ice loss 
    Accelerating ice losses from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and reveal surprisingly steady rates of flow from its much larger neighbor to the east.
     
    Stronger storms mean new ‘category six’ scale may be needed
    Traditional scale used goes only to five but strength and intensity of storms is increasing, stimulating creating a category six to reflect the increasing severity of tropical cyclones in the wake of warming sea temperatures and climate change.Scientifically, six would be a better description of the strength of 320km/h storms, and it would also better communicate the well-established finding now that climate change is making the strongest storms even stronger,
    Climate change will push European cities towards breaking point
    Uurgent need to adapt urban areas to cope with floods, droughts and heatwaves. The research highlights the urgent need to design and adapt our cities to cope with these future conditions.They found the British Isles have some of the worst overall flood projections, with the high scenario predicting half of UK cities could see at least a 50% increase on peak river flows.
    There is a super-hot sport over the North Pole. It has forced the normal frozen Arctic air to the south, creating this crisis.  We should call this the Dragon from the north, not the Beast from the East. The media has not discussed the connection. This is the only so-far-ultimate consequence of warming the planet and the oceans.  
    the Unusually Warm Arctic Might Scare Your Pants Off
    Cities in Europe, meanwhile, are getting hit with unusually cold temperatures and snowfall. That’s days after the U.S. East Coast had record highs.
    Siberian blast to SMASH Britain with ‘coldest winter snap
    Watch the video of icy weather moving into England
    A Large Area of Open Water Forms North of Greenland During February
    Warm winds blowing at up to gale force intensity from the south have assaulted the ice with high waves and above-freezing temperatures for about four days now. The ice edge north of Svalbard is being rapidly beaten back. Perhaps more disturbing, is the fact that the ice pack to the north of Greenland has also now withdrawn — opening up a huge polynya.
    Onset Of Climate Tipping Points
    The global effect of Arctic melting will create almost as much global warming as already produced by the total rise in atmospheric CO2. Once a temperature threshold is breached, abrupt events follow due to amplifying feedbacks, even within a few years, examples being  (1) freeze events which followed temperature peaks during past interglacial peaks due to influx of cold ice-melt water into the north Atlantic Ocean; (2) the Dansgaard–Oeschger warming events during the last glacial period; (3) the Younger dryas stadial freeze and the Laurentian stadial freeze. In some instances it only took a temperature rise of about 1-2 degrees Celsius to trigger extensive ice melt, with a flow of cold melt water into the oceans that triggered abrupt transitions that could occur over a few decades and even few years.