Bitcoin, the war on cash, Clif High, and the NSA's long range plans

[Foxie Loxie]

"Building the train tracks of our own control"! Wow! That really puts cryptos in their correct perspective!

[amor]

Take note of the progression of from SOMETHING of VALUE to WINDPIES on the COMPUTER which cannot be exchanged for a loaf of bread, no constant value--instead you are part of a puzzling gamble without even a receipt as proof. Are you really so stupid?

[Paul]

Back in 2017 (when this thread started and Clif High earned a spot in its title) Clif High was making glorious predictions of new all time highs in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Since then Bitcoin and friends have mostly collapsed to a half or a third of their December 2017 highs.

Meanwhile, Clif High has not posted a video on his Youtube channel for over half a year. As in times past, when his attention getting forecasts fail, he disappears, until he can come back with a new topic.

Well, Clif High is back. He's tauting some new inventions he is working on, such as something that speeds up the process of aging wine and cheese, and he's considering various remedies for Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), which he says afflicts him. I can't comment on his inventions, as he says too little about them, but his understanding of IBS seemed to me to still be rather mired in the conventional allopathic paradigm. You can find this latest uploaded video of his at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBvYm5Ge-C0 . I won't actually embed the video here, as I find it rather sad.

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by Paul (here)
Meanwhile, Clif High has not posted a video on his Youtube channel for over half a year. As in times past, when his attention getting forecasts fail, he disappears, until he can come back with a new topic.

I like Clif — I can't help it! — and while he and I have had our public differences, there's definitely mutual respect. I'd be delighted to have a long dinner with him somewhere, or even just a cup of coffee and a donut.

But its a fact that he's been wildly wrong, many times. In 2012, he kindly invited me to Seattle to meet with him, where he was building an unsinkable boat in preparation for the imminent pole shift. I do wonder if he still has that in his back yard.

===

[Mod-edit: I like Clif High too. He's my kind of smart, old fart geek. Though I did find this latest outing of his to be a bit sad. His mojo was weak. That IBS may be getting him down. -- Paul. ]

[Paul]

Meanwhile, putting Clif High aside, there is a rather prescient forecast of the real impact of cryptocurrencies in the DarkReading.com article An Industry In Transition: Key Tech Trends In 2018.

In this article, Shehzad Merchant, Chief Technology Officer, Gigamon (a private cyber-security firm) makes three predictions:

1. The Pendulum Of Cybersecurity Will Shift From Confidentiality To Integrity And Availability
2. Rise Of Machine Learning
3. Blockchain To The Forefront

I especially like his third prediction, so will quote that here:

===================

3. Blockchain To The Forefront

Any talk about long-term trends would be remiss without a discussion on blockchain. I am referring to the underlying technology behind Bitcoin -- not the cryptocurrency itself. The distributed ledger mechanism of blockchain is very amenable to solving many of the broader problems we face today. While smart contracts seem to be the buzz today around blockchain, the real power lies in harnessing it for fundamental and discontinuous shifts in how we think about trust and the role of centralized trusted authorities. These include governments, banks, clearinghouses, credit verification agencies, etc. Our long-standing reliance on central authorities has created both monopolies and choke points that cybercriminals have been able to target with massive impact.

For example, take the case of the Equifax breach that revealed a record number of user identities. Rather than having a handful of central authorities that control the data of hundreds of millions of users, we should consider models with each user’s credit history protected as part of a blockchain with access rights controlled by the user as needed, such as for credit verification. Leveraging blockchain in this way would fundamentally change how we think about credit reporting, privacy and the ability to access that information for credit history verification.

There are other challenges that will arise, of course, and blockchain itself will need to evolve. However, the overarching point is blockchain has the potential to create discontinuities that can change and reshape the very notion of the role of centralized authorities, governments and banks and their involvement in terms of how we conduct business in our day-to-day lives. There is still a long way to go with it, but it's certainly a very interesting trend to keep an eye on.

===================

I added the bold font on what I thought was the key line above.

To restate the above quote in my own words:

Many of the "central authorities" each of which manage some one or more resources or activities of our complex civilization will "go on the blockchain", meaning the management of those resources or activities will be taken over by shared, secure, distributed ledgers (using such technologies as blockchains) that are operated, managed and governed by a multiplicity of more or less independent, globally based, organizations that each arise to handle one particular ledger, managing one particular resource or activity.

Control of the ledger will become a separate activity from control of the resource it tracks.

This will result in massive globalization, along with massive disenfranchisement of existing corporate or government monopolies that leverage their simultaneous control over both a resource and the ledger tracking that resource in order to extend their monopolistic control over other resources and activities.

Globalization will not primarily be the extension to a global scale of existing major government and corporate institutions, but rather the growth and extension into many areas of human activity of new distributed groupings and institutions, relying on the distributed communication and data sharing, coordination and analysis capabilities arising from our civilization's rapid advances in electronic, communication, computation and data storage technologies since World War II.

This will also result in a massive integration of "electronic intelligence" into this global grid of distributed ledgers, as they (bots, etc) can play this game just as well as humans, if not better.

[Paul]

Posted by Paul (here)
Well ... I have one word to say here. Just one word.

Hashgraph.

Well ... this didn't take long ... what looks like a "better Hashgraph" has come along, less than six months later.

The algorithm is improved a bit more, and what's more important from my perspective, this improvement is open source and is not encumbered by patents.

This new algorithm is called PARSEC (Protocol for Asynchronous, Reliable, Secure and Efficient Consensus), and was announced by the MaidSafe project a week ago.

For concurrency algorithm geeks such as myself, who are also long standing supporters of open source software and who are more recently enamored of the Rust programming language ... this is all quite interesting.

I'll spare any reader the details here (since I might be the only member of Avalon seriously interested in them), but here are some links to more details for others, if any, who wish to examine this further:

• LetsTalkBitcoin Network announcement
• Medium.com announcement
• Youtube video announcement and detailed (1 hour) description
• MaidSafe's SAFE Network Forum announcement
• PARSEC Whitepaper (pdf)
• PARSEC Request for Comment (RFC)

[Jayke]

Posted by Paul (here)
I'll spare any reader the details here (since I might be the only member of Avalon seriously interested in them)...
[*]Medium.com announcement

From the Medium link above...

What does PARSEC do?
PARSEC solves a well-known problem in decentralised, distributed computer networks: how can individual computers (nodes) in a system reliably communicate truths (in other words, events that have taken place on the network) to each other where a proportion of the nodes are malicious (Byzantine) and looking to disrupt the system. Or to put it another way: how can a group of computers agree on which transactions have correctly taken place and in which order?

I love it. You know how I’m always saying Plato described rhetoric as the ability to convey truths, which is the same as the Buddha espousing the dharma. These guys are literally teaching computers how to communicate using good rhetoric The computers in these PARSEC networks are going to be the Buddhas in any upcoming AI communities. Gives me a little more hope that we’re not going to be enslaved by malicious robots in the future. The AI’s are going to be just as mixed up, confused and at odds with each other as us humans if these trends continue.

[Paul]

Posted by Paul (here)

Posted by Paul (here)
Well ... I have one word to say here. Just one word.

Hashgraph.

Well ... this didn't take long ... what looks like a "better Hashgraph" has come along, less than six months later.

On the other hand ... listen to this pitch by Machine Zone's (a game company) CEO Gabriel Leydon to the Hashgraph Launch in March 2018, explaining how he is working on "computing the world", integrating live feeds of sensors, audio, and video, from around the world, in order to make for a fully "Smart" world, fully integrated using A.I., running on top of Hashgraph.

It's a "technocracy" wet dream, and he sounds all too close to making it happen.

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktBGWmWgmxw

It's a scary, dystopian, "Matrix" vision, running on the distributed compute power in the hands, on the desktops, and in the "smart" devices of billions of people, world wide.

===

As a long standing student of distributed computing algorithms, I am quite impressed and delighted with Hashgraph, and the similar open source work PARSEC.

However Hashgraph, and what can be built on it, such as Gabriel Leydon's "Compute the World" vision, is deeply unsettling, and apparently coming soon to a smart phone near you.

[apokalypse]

oh man, on December i brought into hype...brought LTC(7.9192)/BTC(.8)/Ripple(500) total of $6k AUD and now total asset around $2k. Without the money able to correct prediction on prices but once i'm in the game...fear and uncertainty kick in and no greed kick in trying to recover.

Paul and guys...any tips to bounce back?

past week i'm moving from yahoo-gmail to alternative mail like protonmail for privacy, i have been thinking alot about security and blockchain popup in my mind. you could have master key/email address login to your email address this will open every thing which be locked in somewhere, you could have some random key for receiving only and if it's hacked then they can't do anything about it.

we have 2FA but instead of code you have a key for different purpose or level or security...random key for read only, key for read and write..key for sending and/or receiving. key for login only but require key to access data/files programs.

[Paul]

Posted by apokalypse (here)
oh man, on December i brought into hype...brought LTC(7.9192)/BTC(.8)/Ripple(500) total of $6k AUD and now total asset around $2k. Without the money able to correct prediction on prices but once i'm in the game...fear and uncertainty kick in and no greed kick in trying to recover.

Paul and guys...any tips to bounce back?

My secret - I got in back in November, instead of December. It's a lot easier to go from 1 to 10 to 2, than to go from 10 to 2 .

The key for me remains ... what do I reasonably expect the future to bring, with what degree of uncertainty and variability, and am I comfortable with the risk/reward range that I expect?

But still being up by a factor of 2 helps.

Also, as I learned from the dot.com boom in Silicon Valley in the 1990's, it's a good idea to "skim the cream off the top" whenever it rises surprisingly fast. So I've already skimmed off my initial input of 1 (whatever amount of money), which further helps me sleep comfortably at night.

It's a little bit like riding a bicycle ... one can tolerate large errors if riding in an open parking lot at slow speed ... no biggie if one falls over. But if one were riding on some mountain ledge that only a goat would feel comfortable on, then the tolerable margin of error is much less. One's finances are like that too. One shouldn't be playing with high volatility "investments" if one's finances are very close to the edge of disaster, and the failure of that "investment" could be the straw that broke the camel's back.

[A Voice from the Mountains]

Posted by Paul (here)
For concurrency algorithm geeks such as myself, who are also long standing supporters of open source software and who are more recently enamored of the Rust programming language ... this is all quite interesting.

I'll spare any reader the details here (since I might be the only member of Avalon seriously interested in them), but here are some links to more details for others, if any, who wish to examine this further:

I'm interested in them to the extent that I wonder how secure they really are, and what potential vulnerabilities they might have moving forward, but the programming and math go way over my head so ultimately I just have to take someone else's word for it. I've read that NIST has already ordered all of their encryption up several notches because of what they see coming with quantum computing, and I've also read that Bitcoin's encryption will be vulnerable to quantum computers.

I wonder what other possible vulnerabilities there can be to these systems, because if people start putting so much trust into these networks, it's going to be more than a small annoyance if the system becomes compromised. Worst case scenario, it could lead us down a path to the Martix.

[Paul]

Posted by A Voice from the Mountains (here)
I've read that NIST has already ordered all of their encryption up several notches because of what they see coming with quantum computing

Not all their encryption, rather just their public key crypto. Both the prime number factoring (RSA) and elliptic public key crypto will potentially be vulnerable to future quantum computers. Other crypto, such as hash (message digest) crypto routines are not, so far as I am aware, vulnerable to quantum computing. Also, not "ordering" up, but rather soliciting proposals for public key crypto algorithms that, unlike prime number and elliptic, are not vulnerable to quantum computing. The crypto-math geeks have some promising algorithms under development.

Whether or not, or to what extent, concurrency algorithms are vulnerable is a rather separate issue, mostly dependent on whether or not an adversary can gain a third or a half control of the distributed networks nodes, and/or of the communication links connecting them.

[Paul]

A contributor to Miles Mathis' work, Booby Sherman, has provided this critique of Bitcoin: bitfraud.pdf.

Summary: It's a major Jewish, Intelligence, Bankster fraud, intended to provide a new mechanism for tracking, controlling, and extracting our wealth.

[Alpha141]

Posted by apokalypse (here)
oh man, on December i brought into hype...brought LTC(7.9192)/BTC(.8)/Ripple(500) total of $6k AUD and now total asset around $2k. Without the money able to correct prediction on prices but once i'm in the game...fear and uncertainty kick in and no greed kick in trying to recover.

Paul and guys...any tips to bounce back?

past week i'm moving from yahoo-gmail to alternative mail like protonmail for privacy, i have been thinking alot about security and blockchain popup in my mind. you could have master key/email address login to your email address this will open every thing which be locked in somewhere, you could have some random key for receiving only and if it's hacked then they can't do anything about it.

we have 2FA but instead of code you have a key for different purpose or level or security...random key for read only, key for read and write..key for sending and/or receiving. key for login only but require key to access data/files programs.

My Personal advice Apokalyse,

I use to currency and precious metal trade back in 2008-12 when i discovered things about the financial system, the Federal Reserve, Central Banking etc. And, things lead to places like Bill and Kerry's Project Camelot stuff. Clif Also. I use to stay up 40hrs between trades to watch my charts devouring everything i could find while keeping an eye on the trades. I made amazing money at times and lost crazy amounts to. Nothing compares to being something called a 'Paper Trader' vs actually having real equity in the game. Another metaphor could be someone willing to go out and be public vs people not stepping up on the sidelines being critics. It is that sort of energy. While you might be feeling the financial pain the wisdom via the experience you will learn about your justification for entering the trade. Doing a hindsight on what motivated you to enter the market (fear of missing out, actually being part of the heard vs what you think about yourself, greed, unseen potentials etc). You can really do a very powerful assessment. I actually used trading to remove my emotional drive from information and trained my gut. It definitely applies to discernment of information. What i learnt in trading was to identify the potential in things (trades then, information, teachers etc) that do not require anything external to validate. Such as applying the variables i used for identifying traded before the crowd to have success. This came from a great number of failures and hesitations. That was a huge teaching for me to stepping into my own personal leadership. So, which yes it sounds like a very hard lesson your are in. The wisdom from the courage to act you will gain going forth will be massively compounded if you really to a tough review of those motivational aspects and learn them with application. Many would have been on the sidelines being critics. Likely missing the pain but also missing the wisdom from experience. You will find your instincts will go off the charts. A big key is to leave everything of what happened at the door of every choice too. No baggage of fear of failure. Having the courage to fail vs fear of trying due to not wanting to fail is a massive difference. it will play out this way over time.

I have been across Clif myself for many years. I really bit the hook in early 2013 around March 20th about some massive negative event. I think it was called the Coastal Event at the time. I was around the guy i operate with quite a bit (Andrew Bartzis offered for your discernment and transparency) and he was saying nothing is going to happen. But i was totally invested in the disaster narrative. It was a powerful teacher to me then. Being immersed in that fear state. The experience is applicable to the trade metaphor is explained above. Having the experience of that time made me a bit immune to such calls now. It was a important lesson for me. I am not out to blame Clif or anything. I know that time now was a massive audit occurring on Earth that he was picking up. It was just an interpretation thing.

I also have really appreciated Clif's mastery of linguistics. That was vital to me aside from his predictions. The depth of his algorithm and weighting of words was really outstanding to me.

What i personally accept as my truth about money. In part learnt from being immersed in the energy of the money system itself. Whether there is a way to break free from the system in place at present. Trying to do that is the trap. I don't think its Clif's fault things have gone the way they have. IMHO it was a setup for failure just waiting for huge numbers to bite the hook to get really entangled in the legal aspects of their regions. Milk people via fear etc. These are my own understandings of how intricate the system is here. Money is related to Oil. The Petrol Dollar. Which is the world standard. The reason for this is that oil is Earth's cranialsacral fluid. Using oil is like locking down the consciousness of the planet. Doing a spinal tap. Then war energy is imprinted over it and oil is burnt into the crystal roads all over the globe into massive dream catchers called cities. All imprinting a false grid we give consent to and imprinting all the death and destruction from War in the Middle East region aiding to the energy imprint. This system is staggering in its strength. Despite all the critics of it out there. Nothing will change the fundamentals of this as it is about consciousness control. Always. Take it as my out there perceptions. But, it goes way beyond the 3D aspects. If you lack the will to add that unseen aspect to your perception equation going forth you won't make much sense of our reality going forth. Money is also a storage device for human life force with is harvested. Thus all the debt, buildings, people with contracts to be in hierarchical power. We aren't going to defeat this by trying to escape it. We HAVE to be like a very clean energy employ it WITHIN it....Earth in 2013 birthed a virus in the money system out of Crete which stored all the sex slave money from oligarchs. Out of all that abuse she acted. If you are a match to abundance operating in service to Earth that is the greatest potential.

So, imho focus in your emotional mastery, healing, being authentic...The best you can be always. Accept yourself as a potential shaman too....that is likely your next potential. Many of you are already but just haven't accepted it yet.

Cheers all, keep up the great work. Enjoy many of your works and perspectives for a very long time.

[Paul]

Posted by Hervé (here)
How Tavistock got a stranglehold on the US and using it as their play/test ground:

DIPLOMACY BY DECEPTION

by Dr. J Coleman (1993)

Reese discovered that with social engineering comes the greater need for information that can be rapidly collected and correlated.

Posted by Paul (here)
Meanwhile, the global surveillance and control grid, the "Internet of Things" and of 5G antennae, in the sky and on the ground, will deeply integrate human civilization into a Brave New World.

I sense a strong connection, between the above quoted snippets from

• Hervé's A US' Night of The Long Knives -- Post #92, and
• my Stop 5G before it's irreversible! -- Post #100

The global surveillance network will build upon both the Internet of Things and upon the 5G network.

It will also build upon the next generation "Bitcoin" cryptocurrency networks that I've been following in other posts, such as in this Bitcoin, the war on cash, Clif High, and the NSA's long range plans thread.

It will also build upon the massively parallel computer centers, such as at NSA's Utah Data Center, to which I might have contributed, unknowingly, in a small way, with my "big iron" contributions to the Linux kernel. The extensive satellite communications and surveillance grid, that is part of the Secret Space Program that Catherine Austin Fitts and others speak of, is another vital component of this global infrastructure.

This technology will provide the global social engineering project with the pervasive surveillance and control grid, of unparalleled capacity and capability, for which our overlords lust.

[A Voice from the Mountains]

Meanwhile in socialist Venezuela, people are going back to bartering items in order to have some sort of economy to survive.

At least we know that even if all the computer networks crash our digital savings, we can still trade a little gasoline out of a vehicle to the neighbors for some candles to light the house at night.

[Paul]

Thought for the day:

Gold is no longer money. It hasn't been money for nearly a century. It's one form of collateral for debt-money.

The "new" monetary system, which will replace the US Petro-Narco-xGold Reserve Dollar debt-money system, will also be a debt-money system.

(By "xGold" I mean that once upon a time, the US Dollar had "gold backing", but that gold is long gone, hence the "x". Fort Knox is practically empty now.)

The gold bugs who tell us we are returning to using gold and silver as money are wrong, very wrong.

"Gold backing" for a currency means that the issuer of the currency (nation, region, bank, ...) has gold on hand, and that it can and will exchange their currency for that gold. This makes their gold a general form of collateral backing the debts denominated in that currency. For example, the gold in Fort Knox used to back the US Treasury bond debt paper ... as collateral for that debt. That gold backing of the US Dollar ended in the early 1970's, and the gold that might have "backed it" was gone by the 1990's ... stolen by then US President Bill Clinton and his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin.

When a nation has gold that it will exchange for its currency, then all its debts that are denominated in that currency essentially have gold collateral backing. The nation cannot just print more of its currency to pay off its debt, as that extra currency can be traded for gold, which has limited supply.

Over the last half century in particular, the US Dollar has replaced gold in this role. Most of the major debt of other nations is denominated in US Dollars. This forces nations to somehow earn enough US Dollars to make their debt payments. Countries such as Venezuela and Argentina and many others that failed to do so have suffered dreadful collapses. The World Bank and the IMF, as agents of the Banksters of Babylon and Merchants of Venice have played major roles in these pump and dump schemes, enabling major corporations to extract the wealth of nations for "pennies on the dollar" and enabling the world's banksters to control the world's monetary system.

An important transition in the US Dollar system will occur as the current overly indebted Federal Reserve and US Treasury system acknowledges that it is essentially defaulting on the excessive debt it has issued. That debt is in various forms, including US Treasury bills, notes and bonds, social welfare (such as promised Social Security and Medicare payments), corporate debt (such as used in stock buy back programs) and personal debt (such as student loans and car loans). That debt is failing, so is being transformed into calls on the future productivity and resources of the U.S., into a reduction in the value of the US Dollar and US Treasury debt in world markets, and into a decline in the real value of US Federally promised social benefits. Thus will this US Dollar debt default be disguised.

We will transition from a debt-money system into another debt-money system, just with dramatic changes in what are the most valued forms of collateral and in what currency units the debt obligations are denominated in.

Gold will play a somewhat temporary, but important role, in marking the changing power base of the global monetary system, away from Washington and New York, toward wealthy trading nations such as China and resource rich nations such as in Asia and Africa. China and Russia will demonstrate that they can provide gold as collateral for their currencies. However China and Russia will tend go hold tightly to the gold they have accumulated, so their currencies will not be fully and freely "backed" by gold. The gold that they stash has become a symbol of power, traded behind closed doors between the elite, to demark the key players in the world's monetary hierarchy.

More importantly, Russia and China and other nations along the Belt Road Initiative are replacing "bad debt" denominated in US Dollars with "good debt". By "good debt" I mean debt for projects that has a reasonable chance of returning sufficient profits to enable the debt to be paid off.

We all know the difference between "good" and "bad" debt in our personal lives. Borrowing a small amount to gain skills, tools or credentials that will enable a substantial gain in one's income is "good" debt. Borrowing money for a cruise in the Mediterranean or Caribbean, that you could not otherwise afford, is "bad" debt.

As explained in my Banksters of Babylon, Merchants of Venice, and Elders of Zion thread, international trade and debt-money will continue to reign supreme. The King Dollar of Debt Money is dying. Long live the King of Debt Money.

We are not returning to a gold money system. We are on, and will remain on, a debt-money system.

[Akasha]

apologies for trollin' but:

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyA9-jJhlCo

[Paul]

Posted by Paul (here)
or how will (some day soon) a swarm of drones coordinate their mining of metals from a swarm of asteroids?

Here is progress on this front, in the form of autonomous robot factories being developed to work on Mars, producing water, oxygen and fuel:

How NASA Will Use Robots to Create Rocket Fuel From Martian Soil (IEEE Spectrum)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

How NASA Will Use Robots to Create Rocket Fuel From Martian Soil

Engineers are building a prototype of a robotic factory that will create water, oxygen, and fuel on the surface of Mars

By Kurt W. Leucht, 30 Oct 2018 | 15:06 GMT

The Martians: This artist’s rendering shows excavating robots that may one day operate on Mars,
long before humans ever set foot on the planet.

The year is 2038. After 18 months living and working on the surface of Mars, a crew of six explorers boards a deep-space transport rocket and leaves for Earth. No humans are staying behind, but work goes on without them: Autonomous robots will keep running a mining and chemical-synthesis plant they’d started years before this first crewed mission ever set foot on the planet. The plant produces water, oxygen, and rocket fuel using local resources, and it will methodically build up all the necessary supplies for the next Mars mission, set to arrive in another two years.

This robot factory isn’t science fiction: It’s being developed jointly by multiple teams across NASA. One of them is the Swamp Works Lab at NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, where I am a team lead. Officially, it’s known as an in situ resource utilization (ISRU) system, but we like to call it a dust-to-thrust factory, because it turns simple dust into rocket fuel. This technology will one day allow humans to live and work on Mars—and return to Earth to tell the story.

But why synthesize stuff on Mars instead of just shipping it there from Earth? NASA invokes the “gear-ratio problem.” By some estimates, to ship a single kilogram of fuel from Earth to Mars, today’s rockets need to burn 225 kilograms of fuel in transit—launching into low Earth orbit, shooting off toward Mars, slowing down to get into Mars orbit, and finally slowing to a safe landing on the surface of Mars. We’d start with 226 kg and end with 1 kg, which makes for a 226:1 gear ratio. And the ratio stays the same no matter what we ship. We would need 225 tons of fuel to send a ton of water, a ton of oxygen, or a ton of machinery. The only way to get around that harsh arithmetic is by making our water, oxygen, and fuel on-site.

Different research and engineering groups at NASA have been working on different parts of this problem. More recently, our Swamp Works team began integrating many separate working modules in order to demonstrate the entire closed-loop system. It’s still just a prototype, but it shows all the pieces that are necessary to make our dust-to-thrust factory a reality. And although the long-term plan is going to Mars, as an intermediate step NASA is focusing its attention on the moon. Most of the equipment will be tried out and fine-tuned on the lunar surface first, helping to reduce the risk over sending it all straight to Mars.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There is more to this article at the above IEEE Spectrum link.

[Paul]

.
Here's a good article on the current state of cryptocurrencies, whose prices in $US are way, way down from a year ago, and their potential future.

I quite agree with the article that "Bitcoin is one of the most technologically INFERIOR cryptocurrencies", and so might go to zero.

I also quite agree with the article that distributed ledger technologies (DLT's), of which present day cryptocurrencies are early examples, will become a technology of major importance.

From Is crypto finished? - By Simon Black - November 27, 2018, and originally posted on sovereignman.com:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Think back to this time last year, around 2017’s Thanksgiving holiday in the US. . .

As you probably remember, BITCOIN was the dominant theme of the day, whether around the dinner table or in the news headlines.

Crypto prices had soared throughout 2017, climbing from $1,000 at the beginning of the year to around $7,500 by last November’s Thanksgiving holiday.

Then, over the course of that single weekend, Bitcoin jumped to nearly $10,000 as the buying frenzy heated up.

In a matter of days, crypto-broker Coinbase opened hundreds of thousands of new accounts during the 2017 Thanksgiving weekend.

Mobs of speculators were piling in, bidding the price up to new highs on a daily basis, until it cracked $20,000 a month later.

We started warning about this in early November last year, arguing that, while crypto represented great technology to improve the financial system, Bitcoin’s rapid price rise was “purely speculative… not sustainable demand,” and “anything that’s pure speculation is eventually going to pop.”

At the end of 2017, we told you about Saxo Bank’s prediction that Bitcoin would collapse to $1,000 in 2018.

If things keep up this way, they may be proven right.

Bitcoin peaked in early January and has declined throughout 2018 along the lines of Hemingway’s famous quote about going broke: “gradually, then suddenly.”

Over this past weekend (ironically, the 2018 Thanksgiving holiday), Bitcoin’s price fell from $6,000 to less than $4,000.

What a difference a year makes.

Last December and in early January we wrote about how this could happen, explaining that crypto prices were ‘reflexive.’

In other words, as Bitcoin’s price rose rapidly, more people wanted to buy it because they believed the price would continue rising. This created a ton of demand.

But at the same time, very few people were willing to sell. Anyone who owned Bitcoin saw that the price was rising so rapidly and figured, “Why sell today if I can sell tomorrow at a higher price?”

This mismatch of extreme demand and reduced supply caused the price to jump, which created even more demand and reduced supply.

It was all based on a belief that crypto prices would continue rising.

And as we wrote last year, it would work the same in reverse: everyone selling and few people buying causes huge price declines, which makes even more people want to sell and fewer people want to buy.

That’s exactly what we’re seeing now.

I personally know several die-hard Bitcoin fanatics who have finally capitulated and are selling out, getting whatever they can, while they can.

That’s because a lot of folks who profited from crypto’s price rise never actually cashed out.

They believed that the Bitcoin price would continue rising and made blanket assertions like “Bitcoin is going to $1 million. . .”

In the meantime, they loaded up on expensive houses, cars, boats, etc., much of it financed by debt.

Yet while the value of their crypto assets has collapsed 80% from the peak, they still have to service that debt.

So now even some true believers are selling in a panic, simply so that they won’t have to declare personal bankruptcy.

Does that mean it’s over? Are Bitcoin and its cousins headed for the historical dustbin alongside Dutch tulips and Pets.com?

There are so many worthless coins and tokens out there, and many of them are absolutely headed to zero.

Perhaps Bitcoin too. I’ve discussed a few times that Bitcoin is one of the most technologically INFERIOR cryptocurrencies, so it makes little sense that it should be the most valuable.

Personally I think there will continue to be demand for niche, utility-specific coins for things like privacy or more secure e-commerce.

The concept itself is still sound: a medium of exchange that isn’t controlled or manipulated by central bankers, that’s widely accepted across the world for online transactions with minimal costs.

That was the original idea behind Bitcoin as described in its first white paper a decade ago. And some iterative cryptocurrency may still realize that vision some day.

(This is no more far-fetched than Amazon.com gift cards being used as a form of money. . .)

As we’ve written a number of times, though, the bigger opportunity in crypto is in applying its core Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to the countless ways it can be used in commerce and finance.

Look at the banking system as an example: It’s almost 2019. Yet it still often takes 3-5 days to transfer money, whether it’s a domestic ACH transfer in the Land of the Free, or a cross border wire internationally.

Seriously. Are these banks loading crates of cash onto a boat and shipping money via sea freight to one another? It doesn’t make any sense.

Sending money should be as easy as sending email. And the Distributed Ledger Technology that was created around cryptocurrencies makes this possible.

Shockingly, banks are hard at work to make this a reality. It’s as if the rise of crypto finally scared them into raising the bar and improving their services.

But there are countless other industries where these types of applications are sorely needed.

A few decades ago, entrepreneurs (and the investors who funded them) made vast fortunes applying the new technology of the consumer Internet in ways that fundamentally changed our lives– how we shop, share and store information, consume media, engage in personal relationships, etc.

That same opportunity exists today with crypto and DLT.

So from that perspective, this ride is far from over. It’s just beginning.

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Yes - it's just beginning, though Bitcoin itself may join the annals of history as the answer to some trivia question, along side the first mass produced portable computer, theOsborne 1.